Society in Antebellum Period
We Can Read Good: The Penny Press
By 1860, the United States was one of the most literate societies in the world. Even counting slaves, who were mostly illiterate, the U.S. ranked behind only Denmark and Sweden in literacy rates.
Clearly this created a lucrative market for novels, magazines, and print journalism, all of which were produced at record rates and sold to a much larger audience than ever before in Western civilization.
Popularity and Unexpected Consequences
In the 1830s, newspapers underwent a critical transition in America and the number of daily papers more than doubled.
The average circulation doubled as well, and single copies of a magazine could sell as many as 300,000 issues. This rapid expansion was facilitated by new steam-powered presses that could print 4,000 sheets per hour by 1825, and 20,000 sheets per hour by 1847.
Before this transition, paper had functioned as expensive merchant sheets mailed through the post office that gave shipping and price quotes, but not local news. With the transition in journalism that reflected the growth of cities, reading the morning and evening paper became a daily habit for thousands of city-dwellers, which encouraged newspapers to compete to obtain the latest information possible.
It contained all the developments of the previous day, which helped to establish the day as a key temporal unit of orientation in a rapidly industrializing country that increasingly relied upon clock time, rather than the natural patterns of daylight.
Farmers didn't have to "clock in" anywhere, though they certainly had to rise before dawn in order to complete their work, toiling in sync with the seasons to get their crops planted and harvested.
But the new class of industrial workers labored indoors and depended upon a salary that they could earn only through starting and stopping work at specific, pre-specified times. Along with the advent of a 9-5 job, school quickly came to follow the same routinized, clock-reliant process.
Nowadays, we tend to take our form of time-telling for granted, but it wasn't always this way.
Extra, Extra, Read All About It
In 1833, Benjamin Day started the trend of successful one-cent papers with The New York Sun. The New York Herald followed two years later, as did several other papers in places like New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.
Newsboys sold the papers in the city streets, calling out the headlines, which became increasingly sensational as competition heated up and the papers tried to maintain their advertising revenue.
But these papers were an urban phenomenon, restricted to the largest cities, and most Americans still lived in small towns, so their association with the penny press was usually indirect. When the Alamo fell to the Mexican army in 1836, it took over a month for many towns to get the news, as it migrated from paper to paper.
But the new "free press" journalistic style helped to introduce the concept of the public's "right to know," which quickly became a value central to democracy.