The conclusion looks at how contemporary newspapers begin the effort to historicise 1859 and effectively level out the contours of a very distinctive year, along with some of that year’s voices. There is little here on voting reform or the war in Europe, though the Rifle Volunteers are warmly celebrated. This shows what a year book can achieve in putting lost details and voices back into the narrative, thus becoming an important act of witness, but also showing how specific acts of omission go to make up our history and can slow down change. The first parts of The Mill on the Floss were written during 1859, and we see how that year feeds directly into Eliot’s work. The conclusion ends by suggesting that nature in Eliot is a form of collective inheritance that acts as a synecdoche for custom, which in turn is the foundation of her creativity.

This chapter’s wide-ranging account of the Latinx literary history of Los Angeles offers a narrative that is both spatial and temporal. It draws a throughline from the Spanish-language newspapers of the 1870s to modern and contemporary narratives of barrio life (Yxta Maya Murray, Mona Ruiz, Miguel Durán) and the transnationalism of Héctor Tobar and Graciela Limón. López-Calvo and Sae-Saue highlight the irony that despite the centrality of Latinx histories and communities to LA’s development, histories indeed that precede the city becoming “American,” Latinx writing has always been treated as a marginal part of its literary history. This body of literature, the chapter argues, not only records and memorializes the persistent spatial and social marginalization of LA’s Latinx communities but acts as a refusal of such processes, becoming in itself the community of political resistance it so often represents.

The Epilogue draws out the broader implications for the rise of the Atlantic world in the early modern public sphere, demonstrating, first, that what happened in and across the ocean mattered to people at home, and, second, why managing news became a concern for authorities who gradually lost their information monopoly regarding developments across the Atlantic. It reflects on the historiographical repercussions for the fields of Atlantic history and the history of news – making fresh connections to the transoceanic exchange of people, commodities, values, and ideas.

This chapter charts the emergence of the printed newspaper, and focuses on the Low Countries where the new genre first thrived. It provides a microhistorical study of transatlantic coverage in the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands for the year 1630, when both enemies had good and bad news from the Americas to digest. Amsterdam corantos eagerly followed developments in Brazil, where forces of the Dutch West India Company captured Pernambuco, the heart of the Atlantic sugar industry, while the Antwerp newspapers, with just as much zeal, covered the impending arrival of the first Spanish treasure fleet from New Spain and Tierra Firme in more than two years. The detailed comparison of two competing newspapers operating in the same linguistic market demonstrates that the partisan press on either side of the border preferred to follow mainly good news that was waiting to happen. Yet, whereas the newspapers in the authoritarian regime of the Southern Netherlands discounted bad news altogether, the ‘free press’ in Amsterdam covered all stories arriving from across the Atlantic Ocean, thus setting a new standard of credibility that would be replicated in other European media landscapes.

When the Brexit referendum result came in, Tony Gallagher, editor of the Daily Telegraph, triumphantly texted the Guardian newsroom: ‘Who said the mainstream media was finished?’ Gallagher was apeing Kelvin McKenzie, one of his predecessors as Sun editor, who proclaimed after John Major’s upset election victory in 1992: ‘It was the Sun wot won it!’ Brexit appeared to vindicate his view that the press, in particular the Sun, had tipped the balance in favour of Leave. The mood inside the FT newsroom was funereal. Over at The Sunday Times, Michael Sheridan, a veteran foreign correspondent, arrived early that morning to see Martin Ivens alone in the editor’s office. ‘What have you done?,’ he exclaimed, extending a congratulatory hand. Ivens held out the possibility of a renegotiation based on the Brexit vote followed by a second referendum.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Black press provided some of the most detailed accounts of Florence Price’s compositional activity. The Black press presented a counterinstitution to mainstream media and, as such, reported on Price with the awareness that her accomplishments would be experienced vicariously through a readership that encompassed much of the nation’s Black demographic. In comparison, coverage of Price’s work in the white-authored press is less extensive, and often superficial in tone – though it, too, offers crucial information about Price’s career. This chapter charts the relationship between Price and the Black press across multiple contexts, from her childhood in Little Rock through the apex of her compositional career to the final years of her life. In doing so, it highlights a perpetual tug-of-war that emerges in her critical reception: namely, a discourse that concomitantly exceptionalizes and de-exceptionalizes Price, emphasizing her distinctiveness as much as her embeddedness within Black institutional life.

Chapter 3 shows that although urban denizens increasingly sought to prevent loss, possessions still went missing on London’s streets. In response, Londoners established and developed systems of reclamation. Institutions such as the Goldsmiths’ Company and the Bank of England were important in developing systems for dealing with lost plate and bank notes. However, alongside these systems, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, the capital’s residents also benefited from the great age of print culture. Londoners printed handbills and had them pasted up around the city, but a big change took place with the onset of newspaper publications. Newspapers such as the London Gazette and daily newspapers such as the Daily Courant included advertisements for lost watches, strayed dogs and servants who had runaway. As the chapter shows, the efficacy of such notices was at times bolstered by thief-takers, but as the century rolled on, the advertisement themselves became more popular. The chapter shows how urban denizens often sought to simply reclaim their possessions rather than pursuing the prosecution of the thieves who so often ‘found’ them.

Newspaper obituaries of political figures are a distinctive, deeply British genre of political writing, yet one rarely examined. These obituaries trace the rise and fall of British newsprint around the turn of the millennium, a time when newspapers gained new freedoms in technology and politics, briefly flourishing before the internet signalled their decline. Traditionally, obituary writers were anonymous, though by the 1980s, an ‘obituarial turn’ reshaped the genre, widening its scope to include a broader range of lives and details. Obituaries began to embrace anecdotes, highlighting personal quirks and scandals, and thus reflected a broader shift in mores. A central paradox defines the genre: though obituaries appear authoritative in respected newspapers, they are subject to the editorial biases of the day. Shifts in editorship and political climates can reshape reputations, subtly influencing public memory. In the print era, obituaries seemed permanent, existing as clippings and archives. However, the digital age has transformed them: limitless online space has made their reach wider but less impactful. Today, obituaries serve not only as end-points but as starting points for biographical reflections on political lives.

Stories of the violence in the mountains spread quickly by word of mouth and telegraph. Before the end of September 1894, Armenian radicals, British consuls, American missionaries, and Ottoman state officials were beginning to struggle over their interpretations of the violence. Over the course of the next few weeks, two competing narratives coalesced. The first narrative, based on accounts of survivors of the massacres and participating Ottoman troops, reported by ABCFM missionaries and British consuls, stressed how Ottoman troops had been directed to murder large numbers of Armenian villagers under the pretext of destroying a rebellion. The second narrative, composed by the powerful commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army, stressed that the Ottomans restored the peace in a turbulent area at the mountainous edges of imperial control. Throughout this period, the Ottoman state labored to monopolize the legitimate narrative, certain reports were endlessly reproduced within the Ottoman bureaucracy, and those reports remain to this day the official interpretation of what took place in Sasun. At the same time, stories of violence appeared in the British and American presses, with calls for political reform and an impartial investigation of what had taken place.

African newspapers could be important conduits for debates around language and identity; more than that, newspapers were often the very crucible through which new African languages emerged. This chapter tells the twentieth-century story of the emergence of a codified written form of siSwati, the vernacular language of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). Yet the appearance of siSwati was far from straightforward, and it appeared relatively late in the day, only around the 1960s. Earlier Swati intellectuals had largely used the language of neighbouring South Africa – isiZulu – for their print innovations. By the 1950s, a new interest in a written form of siSwati emerged in step with nationalist aspirations. Yet evidence from African-language newspapers shows us that the development of siSwati was fraught, dissent-filled, and uneven. The periodic and decentralized nature of the mid-century African newspaper made these kinds of debates possible, reminding us of the important orthographic work accomplished by print periodicals.

This chapter makes the case for a genealogical, periodical-centred approach to the study of African literature. It argues that the overlooked genre of the newspaper column provided a convivial space for literary experimentation and the generation of alternative literary forms in colonial African contexts. In particular, it highlights the emergence in the periodical press of satirical street literature, a genre that takes African street life as its subject matter and registers its unique dynamics in aesthetic form. Reading two influential examples – R. R. R. Dhlomo’s ‘Roamer’ column and Alex La Guma’s ‘Up my Alley’ – this chapter argues that periodical street literature can be understood as an alternative mode of literary world-making in relation to dominant teleologies and narrative templates. The chapter asks how the inclusion of this ephemeral literary archive reframes understandings of Black city writing in colonial contexts and traces a possible genealogy of afterlives and echoes in the wider world of letters

The introduction grounds African literary studies in practical and material considerations, and shows how print is a site of innovation and transformation. The print archive is shown to be full of texts which are now overlooked, but which enable us to understand much more about the literary productivity of the period, including what printed texts meant, socially and culturally, to their readers. An overview of the three sections of the volume is given, from Part I, which asks when independent African-owned printing presses emerged on the continent, what they published and where their readers were located, to Part II, which asks about the audiences for print culture and how they were convened, and Part III, which asks about the international networks of producers, distributors and readers behind the flows of texts on the continent. Emphasising specificities of language, religion and education, as well as the tangible social and political networks behind the circulation of texts, the introduction suggests that a locally sensitive approach to the study of print networks is essential to our understanding of global movements such as Black internationalism and Islam.

Focusing on the proliferation of independent African-owned presses in eastern Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s, this chapter discusses the popular pamphlets known as Onitsha market literature. The chapter asks how the upsurge in local publishing shaped readers’ ideas about literary languages and contributed to authors’ social prestige as intellectuals. The chapter describes the practicalities of pamphlet production, as well as the ways pamphleteers offered fresh conceptualisations of literary inspiration outside dominant western frameworks for works of the imagination.

In colonial West Africa, where the level of literacy, in European language, was low, movies served as an accessible means to convey attitudes, ideas or stories. This chapter addresses the dialogue between movies and the written text (posters, advertisements, etc) to explore the ways in which African film spectators made sense of foreign images brought to them on screens. Urban movie goers read newspapers to look for schedules or film reviews, and the general public depended on posters displayed in front of movie theaters and also on word of mouth for information about movies. Sometimes posters were printed locally but most of them came with the movies, conveying foreign cultural messages which passers-by had to decipher according to their own cultures and cinematographic knowledge.

During the 1790s, the US developed a partisan political culture based upon both old and new rituals. Political culture is the expression of a people’s beliefs and values through the rites and rituals of politics – as practiced both within the doors of government and out in the streets. This partisanship culture was expressed through newspapers, petitions, public meetings, parades, toasts, clothing, and accessories. Through use of the similar rituals and rites, Federalists and Republicans sought to convey different messages to the people. Federalists used these rituals to stress the need for confidence or trust in the new Constitution and government. Republicans emphasized the need for the people to be jealous or protective of their rights won in the Revolution as the best way to protect the Republic. Each party claimed to speak for the people and in the best interest of the nation.