Charles E. Clark – författare

The Public Prints is the first comprehensive study of the role of the earliest American newspapers in the society and culture of the eighteenth century. In the hands of Charles E. Clark, American newspaper publishing becomes a branch of the English world of print in a story that begins in the bustling streets of late seventeenth-century London and moves to the provincial towns of England and across the Atlantic. While Clark's most detailed attention in America is to the three multi-newspaper towns of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, evidence from Williamsburg, Charleston, and Barbados also contributes to generalizations about the craft and business of eighteenth-century publishing. Stressing continuing trans-Atlantic connections as well as English origins, Clark argues that the newspapers were a force both for `anglicization' in their attempts to replicate English culture in America and for `Americanization' in creating a fuller awareness of the British-American experience across colonial boundaries. He suggests, finally, that the newspapers' greatest cultural role in provincial America was the creation of a community bound by the celebration of common values and attachments through the shared ritual of reading.

For the Abnaki Indians who came east, Maine was Dawnland. Other settlers--Europeans--came west, searching first for Norumbega, a mythical city of gold and silver. What they found was more modest, but still it was enough to set them thinking of the different uses to which the place might be put. Most saw what they wanted to see: for naturalist John Josselyn, the region was an idyllic curiosity; Cotton Mather saw a moral desert inviting conquest by Puritan Massachusetts; James Sullivan pictured Maine as a symbol of the romantic nationalism of the new American nation; and in the nineteenth century, John Alfred Poore envisioned it as a vast commercial empire of shipbuilding and lumbering, with Portland as its capital. For Quaker New Dow, Maine was a crucible for testing prohibition and other reforms; for entrepreneurs after the Civil War, it was the site of paper manufacturing and potato farming that brought new exploitation, new French-Canadian immigrants, and a new concern for conservation of dwindling resources. Others more recently have seen a part-time Maine: a summer home to be visited once a year or marketed to those who do.Today, Maine continues to evoke in resident and visitor alike conflicting images that mirror the desire both for more jobs and cheaper energy, and for unspoiled coastlines and forest--both the quest for prosperity and the need for natural places where men's thoughts tend to be, in the words of Maine native Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "long, long thoughts."