The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, Ala.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
9,739 issues from 1901 to 1927, published in Montgomery, Alabama, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Montgomery Advertiser was first published in 1829 as a result of merging the Planters’ Gazette, owned at the time by printer Edward W. Thompson, with the Alabama Journal, owned by Georgia Governor George Washington Bonaparte Towns. The paper would become the leading newspaper of the Confederate States by 1861, but prior to that, it maintained united coverage of Montgomery with differing political perspectives as the owners belonged to the clashing Whig and Democratic Parties. Continuing into the twentieth century, the paper has slanted conservative. Today it is the largest of Alabama’s 22 daily published newspapers.
The Advertiser‘s main purpose was to communicate area business, reporting on the daily events and issues pertaining to the citizens of what would become the state’s capital city in 1846. During the turn of the twentieth century, the paper dismissively covered racial tensions in the area. When describing a “serious practical joke” played upon a young boy, the Advertiser reported, “The Callen negro went to a doctor as fast as he could. He was nauseated before he reached the physician, whether from imagination cannot be told” (October 28, 1902). The report further explained that after a stomach pump, the boy had ingested sulphur-coated matchstick heads that had been hidden inside a gifted dessert. The same antagonistic reporting would reemerge during the civil rights movement in the latter half of the century. A March 25, 1956 editorial by Edward Baptist…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Montgomery, Alabama, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress