Before this presentation, I was familiar with Frederick Douglass' history but unaware of the creation of The North Star. The North Star was a newspaper created by Douglass that made history as the first abolitionist newspaper written and published by a black man. This is a very significant piece of writing, especially since every one of the abolitionist newspapers at the time such as The Liberator, The Emancipator, and Alton's Observer were not written or published by black men. The newspapers had instead been written by northern white men who were sympathetic to the plights of slavery, but could not empathize with them.
The North Star was inspired by The Liberator. I found it interesting that Frederick Douglass used The Liberator as a muse while creating The North Star, as he was dissatisfied with the fact that it had been written and published by a white man. I was also quite intrigued by the story about how The North Star got its title. Around the time the paper was written, a series of states in the North banned slavery. Many slaves were able to flee the South by using the North Star as a guide to get to the North. This title makes the paper all the more a vital piece of history.
From what I gathered on Publick Occurrences, it paved the way for an essential part of our first amendment rights: freedom of the press. Publick Occurrences was the first colonial newspaper in America. The paper only released one issue, but regardless, it shaped the future of the people vs. the government and had a hand in determining whether the people should have freedom of the press years before it was actually written into the constitution. Benjamin Harris created the paper, with four pages and featuring blank sides for reader commentary. Nowadays, we'd consider that pretty short, but they didn't!
The paper was also the first colonial newspaper in America to have multiple pages. Before Publick Occurrences, people published single pages of news and/or read newspapers shipped from England. After a few short days of existence, Publick Occurrences was shut down due to a lack of license. I think although Publick Occurrences had a far-from-ideal run length, the fact that Benjamin Harris had his voice heard at all made its creation worth the cancellation.
The Boston News-Letter came around fourteen years after Publick Occurrences and was legally created and published by John Campbell. I can't even imagine what our world would look like right now if we didn't have a news source for fourteen years. That just goes to show how much we depend on the news. The Boston News-Letter was technically one page long, with information taking up two sides of one piece of paper, much shorter than Publick Occurrences. Campbell also made sure to mark each page with "Published By Authority" to show readers that he was legally publishing the paper. Smart man!
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