Neither the Spanish possessions of Florida and New Mexico nor New France possessed a printing press, although missionaries had established one in Mexico City in the 1530s. In British North America, however, the press expanded rapidly during the eighteenth century. So did the number of political broadsides and pamphlets published, especially at election time. Widespread literacy created an expanding market for printed materials. By the eve of the American Revolution, some three-quarters of the free adult male population in the colonies (and more than one-third of the women) could read and write, and a majority of American families owned at least one book. Philadelphia boasted no fewer than seventy-seven bookshops in the 1770s.
Benjamin Franklin’s quest for self-improvement, or, as he put it in his autobiography, “moral perfection,” is illustrated in this “Temperance diagram,” which charts his behavior each day of the week with regard to thirteen virtues. They are listed on the left by their first letters: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. Franklin did not always adhere to these virtues.
Circulating libraries appeared in many colonial cities and towns, making possible a wider dissemination of knowledge at a time when books were still expensive. The first, the Library Company of Philadelphia, was established by Benjamin Franklin in 1731. “So few were the readers at that time, and the majority of us so poor,” Franklin recalled in his Autobiography (1791), that he could find only fifty persons, mostly “young tradesmen,” anxious for self-improvement and willing to pay for the privilege of borrowing books. But reading, he added, soon “became fashionable.” Libraries sprang up in other towns, and ordinary Americans came to be “better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank” abroad.
The first continuously published colonial newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, appeared in 1704 (a predecessor, Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick, established in Boston in 1690, had been suppressed by authorities after a single issue for criticizing military cooperation with the Iroquois). There were thirteen colonial newspapers by 1740 and twenty-five in 1765, mostly weeklies with small circulations—an average of 600 sales per issue. Probably the best-edited newspaper was the Pennsylvania Gazette, established in 1728 in Philadelphia and purchased the following year by Benjamin Franklin, who had earlier worked as an apprentice printer on his brother’s Boston periodical, the New England Courant. At its peak, the Gazette attracted 2,000 subscribers. Newspapers initially devoted most of their space to advertisements, religious affairs, and reports on British society and government. But by the 1730s, political commentary was widespread in the American press.