Using the Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr to Explore Revolutionary Boston

My presentation will discuss using the free, public-access database “The Annotated Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr, Jr.” (established and maintained by the Massachusetts Historical Society; http://www.masshist.org/dorr/browse), as an introductory undergraduate class exercise. This resource provides a way to introduce students to the peculiarities of eighteenth-century newspapers, and the methods involved in doing research with these types of documents, through a relatively small and easy-to-use collection. Dorr, a Boston merchant, lived in Boston during the “interesting times,” of the Revolutionary Crisis and War, and collected newspapers from 1765-1776 (sometimes scribbling angry pro-Patriot comments in the margin). His descendants later bound his paper collection into a four-volume collection that is now scanned and available online.

I use this exercise to start my Revolutionary course at the start of the semester. In my introductory lecture, I first give a brief presentation about Early American newspapers, America’s first “mass media,” and how discuss news circulated in Colonial America, and I hand out a list of important Revolutionary dates. The students need to explore the Dorr database to choose a newspaper article to bring to discuss the following class, along with a one-page written analysis of their chosen document. The exercise has, in the past, led to a great free-ranging conversation about the events of the Revolutionary crisis and war, which allowed the students to first express their views before the professor started gassing on (and also let me get a sense of their background knowledge). I think it also starts them out with a more concrete idea of the kind of materials Early American historians use, and the difficulties inherent in working with them (what survives and what doesn’t; difficulties in interpretation, etc.)