The San Francisco Call (San Francisco [Calif.])
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
6,839 issues from 1895 to 1913, published in San Francisco, California, digitised for Chronicling America.
The San Francisco Call began life on December 1, 1856, as the Daily Morning Call. Staunchly Republican in political outlook, the Call was popular with the working classes, and it was the city’s leading morning newspaper for several decades. By the summer of 1864, the Call was boasting the highest daily circulation in the city, and its readership continued to rise, going from 10,750 in 1865 to 41,066 in 1880. In 1884 it boasted a circulation double that of any other daily. Originally a four page daily, the Call also put out a weekly, published on Tuesdays, and a Sunday edition. One of the paper’s early writers was Mark Twain, who served as Nevada correspondent in 1863 and as reporter after he moved to San Francisco the following year. In just over four months as full time beat reporter, Twain produced some 200 articles on crime and the courts, theater and the opera, and politics.
Among the original owners of the Call were James Joseph Ayers, Charles F. Jobson, and Llewellyn Zublin. Peter B. Forster soon joined the group, and, by May 1866, he became the paper’s publisher of record. In 1869, George K. Fitch, Loring Pickering, and James W. Simonton, owners of the rival San Francisco Bulletin, purchased the Call and ran it for over two decades. By the 1890s, the paper’s staff had grown to over 40, including editorial writers, sports reporters, and drama and art critics. In January 1895, after the deaths of Pickering and Simonton, the Call was sold in probate court to Charles M.…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- San Francisco, California, 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