The Penny Press and Antebellum Journalism

Back to Index Page

Anthony, David.  “The Helen Jewett Panic: Tabloids, Men, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum New York.”  American Literature 69:3 (September 1997): 487-514.

Bernhardt, Mark.  “Red, White, and Black: Opposing Arguments on Territorial Expansion and Differing Portrayals of Mexicans in the New York Sun’s and New York Herald’s Coverage of the Mexican War.”  Journalism History 40:1 (Spring 2014): 15-27.

Bjork, Ulf Jonas. “Latest from the Canadian Revolution: Early War Correspondence in the New York Herald, 1837-1838.” Journalism Quarterly 71:4 (1994): 851-860.

Bjork, Ulf Jonas. “The Commercial Roots of Foreign Correspondence: The New York Herald and Foreign News, 1835-1839.” American Journalism 11 (Spring 1994): 102-115. 

Bjork, Ulf Jonas.  “Sketches of Life and Society: Horace Greeley’s Vision of Foreign Correspondence.”  American Journalism 14:3-4 (1997): 359-375.

Bjork, Ulf Jonas. “‘Sweet is the Tale’: A Context for the New York Sun’s Moon Hoax.” American Journalism 18, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 13–27.

Bjork, Ulf Jonas.  “Foreign Correspondence in the Early Telegraphic era: The Herald, the Tribune, and the 1848 Revolutions.” American Journalism 40:4 (Fall 2023): 447-467. 

Borchard, Gregory A.  “Revolutions Incomplete: Horace Greeley and the Forty-Eighters at Home and Abroad.”  American Journalism 27:1 (Winter 2010): 7-36.

Borden, Morton.  “Some Notes on Horace Greeley, Charles Dana, and Karl Marx.”  Journalism Quarterly 8 (April 1957): 20-25.

Bovee, Warren G.  “Horace Greeley and Social Responsibility.”  Journalism Quarterly 63 (Summer 1986): 251-259.

Brazeal, Donald K.  “Precursor to Modern Media Hype: The 1830s Penny Press.”  Journal of American Culture 28 (Dec. 2005): 405–14.

Brewer, Fredric. “The First Question-Answer Newspaper Interview, Redux.” American Journalism 8, no. 1 (1991): 6–9.

Buddenbaum, Judith M.  “Judge…What Their Acts Will Justify: The Religion Journalism of James Gordon Bennett.”  Journalism History 14: 2-3 (1987): 54-67.

Buozis, Michael.  “Reading Helen Jewett’s Murder: The Historiographical Problems and Promises of Journalism.”  American Journalism 35:3 (Summer 2018): 334-356.

Canada, Mark.  Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America: Thoreau, Stowe, and the Contemporaries Respond to the Rise of the Commercial Press.  New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.

Carlson, Oliver. The Man Who Made News. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942. James Gordon Bennett 

Cline Cohen, Patricia, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz.  The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Cook, James W.  The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Copeland, David A. “A Series of Fortunate Events: Why People Believed Richard Adams Locke’s ‘Moon Hoax.” Journalism History 33:3 (Fall 2007): 140-150.

Cross, Coy F.  Go West, Young Man! Horace Greeley’s Vision for America.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Crouthamel, James L. “James Gordon Bennett, the New York Herald, and the Development of Newspaper Sensationalism.” New York History 54 (July 1973): 294-316. 

Crouthamel, James L.  Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989.

Dowling, David.  “Reporting the Revolution: Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, and the Italian Risorgimento.”  American Journalism 31:1 (Winter 2014): 26-48.

Fash, Lydia G.  “Fake News!!  Poe’s Balloon Story and the Penny Papers.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 66: 3 (2020): 445-479.

Fee, Jr., Frank E.  “Intelligent Union of Black with White: Frederick Douglas and the Rochester Press, 1847-48.”  Journalism History 31:1 (Spring 2005): 34-45.

Fee, Frank E., Jr.  “Breaking Bread, not Bones: Printers’ Festivals and Professionalism in Antebellum America.”  American Journalism 30:3 (Summer 2013): 308-335.

Floan, Howard R.  “The New York Evening Post and the Antebellum South.”  American Quarterly 8 (Fall 1956): 243-253.

Franke, Warren.  “Sensationalism and the Development of 19th Century Reporting.” Journalism History 12 (Autumn 1985): 80-.

Gabrial, Brian.  “From Haiti to Nat Turner: Racial Panic Discourse During the 19th Century Partisan Press Era.”  American Journalism 30:3 (Summer 2013): 336-364.

Gasffield, Gary D.  “To Speak and Act Boldly in the Cause of God: Profession and Practice in American Journalism, 1815-1845.”  Journal of Popular Culture 15:2 (1981): 3-23.

Goodman, Matthew.  The Sun and the Moon.  New York: Basic Books, 2008.  (NY Sun and the “moon hoax”)

Gross, Robert, and Mary Kelly, eds.  An Exhaustive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society, 1790-1840.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Henkin, David M. City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Hoffert, Sylvia D. “New York’s Penny Press and the Issue of Women’s Rights, 1848-1860.” Journalism Quarterly 70 (1993), 656-665.

Horney, Jennifer.  “Representing the Penny Press Revolution of the 1830s: Reading the Newspaper in Nineteenth-Century American Genre Painting.”  Columbia Journal of American Studies 4:1 (2000): 93-113.

Huntzicker, William E.  The Popular Press, 1833-1865. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Isley, Jeter Allen.  Horace Greeley and the Republican Party, 1853-1861: A Study of the New York Tribune.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.

Jaffe, Steven Harold.  “Unmasking the City: The Rise of the Urban News Reporter in New York City, 1800-1850.”  Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1989.

Jones, Charlotte D.  “The Penny Press and the Origins of Journalistic Objectivity.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1985.

Katz, Wendy Jean.  Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press.  New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.

Kendall, George Wilkins.  Dispatches from the Mexican War.  Lawrence Delbert Cress, ed.  Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

Knight, Charles.  The Old Printer and the Modern Press.  New York: AMS Press, 1974.  (reprint of 1854 edition)

Knuth, Haley Amanda. “Who Controls the Narrative? Newspapers and Cincinnati’s Anti-Black Riots of 1829, 1836, and 1841.” PhD dissertation, Miami University, 2022.

Koerber, Duncan. “Political Operatives and Administrative Workers: The Newspaper Agents of Mackenzie’s Gazette, 1838–40.” Journalism History 36 (Fall 2010): 160–168.

Lacey, Barbara E.  From Sacred to Secular: Visual Images in Early American Publications.  Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007.

Leonard, Thomas C.  The Power of the Press: The Birth of America Political Reporting.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Levermore, Charles H.  “The Rise of Metropolitan Journalism, 1800-1840.” American Historical Review 6:3 (April 1901): 446-465. 

Levi, K. E.  “The Wisconsin Press and Slavery.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 9:4 (1926): 423-434.

Lehuu, Isabelle.  Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Linkon, Sherry Lee. “Reading Lind Mania: Print Culture and the Construction of Nineteenth-Century Audiences.” Book History 1 (1998): 94-106.

Littmann, Mark.  “American Newspapers and the Great Meteor Storm of 1833: A Case Study in Science Journalism.”  Journalism and Communication Monographs 10:3 (Autumn 2008): 250-284.

Loughran, Trish, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Lundberg, James McMurrin. “Horace Greeley and the Culture of American Capitalism, 1834–1872.”  PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2009.

Marshall, Nicholas. “The Rural Newspaper and the Circulation of Information and Culture in New York and the Antebellum North.”  New York History 88 (Spring 2007): 133–51.

Mayer, Gordon.  “Party Rags?: Politics and the News Business in Chicago’s Party Press, 1831-71.”  Journalism History 32:3 (Fall 2006): 138-146.

Miller, Linda Patterson.  “Poe on the Beat: Doings of Gotham as Urban, Penny Press Journalism.”  Journal of the Early Republic 7:2 (Summer 1987): 147-165.

Mitchell, Catherine C.  Margaret Fuller’s New York Journalism.  Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

Moore, R. Laurence.  “Religion, Secularization, and the Shaping of the Culture Industry in Antebellum America.”  American Quarterly 41:2 (June 1989): 216-242.

Nelson, Anna Kasten.  “Secret Agents and Security Leaks: President Polk and the Mexican War.”  Journalism Quarterly 52 (1975).

Nerone, John C. “The Mythology of the Penny Press.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4 (1987): 376-404.

Parton, James.  “The New York Herald.”  North American Review 102 (April 1866): 373-419.

Peko, Samantha.  “Mortimer Thompson’s ‘Witches of New York’: Undercover Reporting on the Fortune-Telling Trade.” American Journalism 37:4 (2020): 500-521. 

Perkins, H.C.  “The Defense of Slavery in the Northern Press on the Eve of the Civil War.”  Journal of Southern History9:4 (1943): 501-531. 

Pribanic-Smith, Erika J. “Conflict in South Carolina’s Partisan Press of 1829.” American Journalism 30 (Summer 2013): 365–392.

Pribanic-Smith, Erika J. “Partisan News and the Third-Party Candidate.” Journalism History 39 (Fall 2013): 168–178.

Reilly, Tom.  “Newspaper Suppression During the Mexican War, 1846-1848.”  Quarterly 54 (Summer 1977): 262-270.

Reilly, Tom.  War With Mexico! America’s Reporters Cover the Battlefront.  Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010.

Rieppel, Lukas.  “Hoaxes, Humbugs, and Frauds: Distinguishing Truth from Untruth in Early America.”  Journal of the Early Republic 38:3 (Fall 2018): 501-529.

Roth, Michael.  “Journalism and the U.S.-Mexican War,” in Dueling Eagles: Reinterpreting the U.S.-Mexican War, Richard Francaviglia and Douglas W. Richmond, eds.  Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2000.

Roth, Sarah N. “The Politics of the Page: Black Disfranchisement and the Image of the Savage Slave.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 134 (July 2010): 209–233.

Rowe, Adam. “The Republican Rhetoric of a Frontier Controversy: Newspapers in the Illinois Slavery Debate, 1823–1824.” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Winter 2011): 671–699.

Russo, David J.  “The Origins of Local News in the U.S. Country Press, 1840s-1870s.”  Journalism Monographs 65 (February 1980).

Saalberg, Harvey. “Bennett and Greeley, Professional Rivals, Had Much in Common.” Journalism Quarterly 49 (1972): 538-546, 550. 
Saxton, Alexander.  “Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press.”  American Quarterly 36 (Summer 1984): 211-234.

Saxton, Alexander.  The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America.  rev. ed.  New York: Verso, 2003.  several chapters on print media

Schafer, Judith Kelleher.  “New Orleans Slavery in 1850 as Seen in Advertisements.” Journal of Southern History 47:1 (1981): 33-56.

Schiller, Daniel I. Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.

Seitz, Don C. The James Gordon Bennetts; Father and Son; Proprietors of the New York Herald. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928. 

Seybold. Matt.  “Destroyer of Confidence: James Gordon Bennett, Jacksonian Paranoia, and the Original Confidence Man.” American Studies 56:3/4 (2018): 83-106.

Shaw, Donald L. “Change and Continuity in American Press News, 1820-1860.” Journalism History 8 (Summer 1981): 38-50.

Shaw, Donald L. and John W. Slater. “In the Eye of the Beholder?: Sensationalism in American Press News, 1820-1860.” Journalism History 12 (Winter 1985): 86-91.

Sheehy, Michael. “Reporting on Party Spirit: The Western Spy’s Coverage of the March to Ohio Statehood.” Journalism History 36 (Winter 2011).

Shudson, Michael.  Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers.  New York: Basic Books, 1978.

Smith, Jeff.  “Things Appearing, Every Day: Walt Whitman and the Ubiquity of News.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 66:1 (2020): 1-45.  

Snay, Mitchell. Horace Greeley and the Politics of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. 

Snay, Mitchell. “Horace Greeley’s New-Yorker: The Newspaper as Literary Institution in Jacksonian America.” New York History 92 (Winter–Spring 2011): 41–51.

Stevens, John D.  Sensationalism and the New York Press. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Stewart, Daxton R.  “Freedom’s Vanguard: Horace Greeley on Threats to Press Freedom in the Early Years of the Penny Press.”  American Journalism 29:1 (Winter 2012): 60-83.

Stillson, Richard T.   Spreading the Word: A History of Information in the California Gold Rush.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

Streeby, Shelly.  American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Streckfuss, Richard.  “Objectivity in Journalism: A Search and a Reassessment.”  Journalism Quarterly 67 (1990): 973-83.

Summers, Mark W.  “Dough in the Hands of the Doughface?: James Buchanan and the Untamable Press.”  In Michael J. Birker, ed. James Buchanan and the Political Crisis of the 1850s.  Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1996.

Taylor, Sally.  “Marx and Greeley on Slavery and Labor.”  Journalism History 6:4 (Winter 1979): 103-106, 122.

Tebbe, Jennifer.  “Print and American Culture.”  American Quarterly 32:3 (1980): 259-279.

Thompson, Susan A.  “The Antebellum Penny Press.”  PhD dissertation, University of Alabama, 2002.

Thompson, Susan A.  The Penny Press: The Origins of the Modern News Media, 1833-1861.  Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2004.

Thornton, B.  “The Moon Hoax: Debates About Ethics in 1835 New York Newspapers.”  Journal of Mass Media Ethics 15:2 (2000): 89-100.

Tucher, Andie.  Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness and Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Tuchinsky, Adam.  “The Bourgeoise Will Fall, and Fall Forever: The New York Tribune, the 1848 French Revolution, and American Social Democratic Discourse.” Journal of American History 92:2 (September 2005): 470-497.

Tuchinsky, Adam.  Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Tucher, Andie. “PrinceOfDarkness@NYHerald.com: How the Penny Press Caused the Decline of the West.” American Journalism 17, no. 4 (2000): 121–127.

Wells, Richard R.  “The Making of the New York Penny Press: An Ethnographic History of a Mass Cultural Form.”  PhD dissertation, New School University, 2004. 486 pp.

Whitby, Gary L.  “The New York Penny Press and the American Romantic Movement.”  Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1984.

Whitby, Gary L.  “Economic Elements of Opposition to Abolition and Support of South by Bennett in New York Herald.”  Journalism Quarterly 65 (1988): 78-84.

Whitby, Gary L.  “Horns of a Dilemma: The Sun, Abolition, and the 1833-34 New York Riots.”  Journalism Quarterly 67 (1990): 410-419.

Whitby, Gary L. “Tough Talk and Bad News: Satire and the New York Herald, 1835–1860.” American Journalism 9 (1992): 35–52.

Wilmer, L. A. Our Press Gang, Or a Complete Exposition of the Corruptions and Crimes of the American Newspaper.  Philadelphia: Lloyd, 1859.

Wingate, Jordan.  “Enslaved Pressmen in the Southern Press.” American Periodicals 32:1 (2022): 34-52.

Yotova, Denitsa.  “Urban Journalism as an Antecedent to Muckraking: George G. Foster and the Antebellum New York Press.”  Journalism History 44:4 (Winter 2019): 221-231.

Back to Index Page