Nord on Newspapers in 1737, 2 Dec

The American Antiquarian Society will host a Regional Academic Seminar tomorrow, in conjunction with the history departments of Brown University, Clark University, and the University of Connecticut. Their event announcement:

On Tuesday, December 2, at 4:30 P.M., David Paul Nord, professor of journalism and adjunct professor of history at Indiana University and the current Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the A.A.S., will be presenting

Boston, 1737: the News milieu

Précis: This paper is about how people used news to make sense of urban life in eighteenth-century America. It explores the intersection of private lives and public spaces in one city at one moment in time: Boston, 1737. Though its population was only about 15,000 in 1737, Boston had already become a city with a rich communication system that generated a multi-layered milieu of news. This news milieu existed in public and private meetings, street chatter and backroom conspiracies, churches and taverns, letters and diaries, petitions and manuscript ‘publications,’ pamphlets and maps, newspapers and broadsides, proclamations and sermons, night watchmen crying the weather, and militiamen beating drums.

Refreshments will be provided after the paper, which will be followed by a dutch-treat dinner in Worcester. For further information, or to RSVP, please visit the A.A.S. website.

Prof. Nord will speak in the A.A.S.’s Goddard-Daniels House (shown above) at 190 Salisbury Street in Worcester. (Let’s be careful out there.)