The Workingman's Advocate (Chicago [Ill.])
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
415 issues from 1864 to 1877, published in Cincinnati, Ohio, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Chicago Workingman’s Advocate was established in the summer of 1864 by members of the Chicago Typographical Union. In April of that year, the union had called a strike against the Chicago Times, and union leaders felt the strike was receiving unfair coverage in the local press. Even newspapers traditionally hostile to the Times, like the Chicago Tribune, mocked and denounced the strikers; a strike at any newspaper had the potential to foment discontent among workers at all newspapers. The union responded by publishing its own newspaper, something it was uniquely positioned to do as its membership came from the very trades that specialized in printing newspapers. The earliest issues of the Workingman’s Advocate therefore focused most heavily on the union’s conflict with both the Times, and also on mischaracterizations of the strike in the popular press.
The Workingman’s Advocate claimed to be “devoted exclusively to the interests of the producing classes of the Northwest,” but actually published a large amount of general interest content unrelated to the labor movement, possibly a sign that the editors, although experts on the printing side of newspaper publishing, struggled with news-gathering, forcing them to rely on so-called “evergreen” content. Evergreen content was a staple of over-extended newspaper editors everywhere. Examples of evergreen content include poetry, fiction, essays, historical facts, epigrams, humor, and reports of sensational or “curious” events…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Cincinnati, Ohio, 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