A. J. Andrea & C. Neel (eds), World History Encyclopedia, 2011, vol.
14
238 | ERA 7: 1750–1914 n SociEtY and culturE
Hearst, competed with the AP for control of tele-
graphic lines and of news stories.
Media moguls such as William Randolph
Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer offered innovations to
newsprint formats and newspaper reporting as a
result of fierce competition for readers. Hearst,
who introduced color print to newspapers, is
most famous for his tactics of yellow journalism
during the “paper wars” with Joseph Pulitzer in
1896–1898. By 1935, Hearst had 26 daily newspa-
pers in 19 cities and operated two news services.
Pulitzer developed New Journalism, a form that
included larger headlines and sensationalist ex-
posés of urban ills as well as more pages, news,
and illustrations as a way to attract readers. In
addition to founding United Press Associations
(later United Press International), Edward W.
Scripps founded the first American newspaper
chain, which included 34 newspapers in mid-
sized cities in the Midwest and toward the Pacific
coast. In England, Lord Northcliffe (1865–1922)
built his media empire by acquiring the London
Evening News (1894) and the London Times
(1908) and founding the Daily Mirror (1903).
By the early 1900s newspapers were a sig-
nificant social and cultural force that provided
information, opinion, and even entertainment
for millions of individuals. Along with mass-
circulation books and periodicals, newspapers
with their mass circulation, reliance on new
technologies, and ability to both cater to and
shape public tastes, provided an early foundation
for what would later be termed mass culture.
—Barton Price
Bibliography
Carroll, Dewey Eugene. Newspaper and Periodical
Production in Countries of Europe, 1600–1950:
A Quantitative Historical Analysis of Patterns
of Growth. PhD dissertation, University of Illi-
nois, 1966.
Ferreira, Leonardo. Centuries of Silence: The Story
of Latin American Journalism. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2006.
Martin, Shannon E., and David A. Copeland, eds. The
Function of Newspapers in Society: A Global
Perspective. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
Moran, James. Printing Presses: History and Devel-
opment from the Fifteenth Century to Modern
Times. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1973.
Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism, a His-
tory: 1690–1960. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan,
1962.
Starr, Paul. The Creation of the Media: The Political
Origins of Modern Communications. New
York: Basic Books, 2004.
Winseck, Dwayne R., and Robert M. Pike. Communi-
cation and Empire: Media, Markets, and Glo-
balization, 1860–1930. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007.
Books and Reading
In 1792, London bookseller James Lackington re-
ported in his memoirs that four times the num-
ber of books were being published and sold that
year as had been 20 years earlier. He observed
that even “the poorer sort of farmers and even
poor country people in general” were now gath-
ering their families on cold winter nights to read
“tales and romances” rather than telling “stories
of witches, ghosts, and goblins.” The booksell-
er’s impressions have been confirmed by histori-
ans, who have described the eighteenth century
as a period in which reading became a popular
everyday activity.
Historians ascribe this change to a number
of factors, including a rise in literacy rates, im-
proved standards of living, increased leisure,
the commercialization of the publishing indus-
try, and the Age of Enlightenment’s faith in the
power of knowledge and reason as the source of
progress. During the eighteenth century books
increasingly were transformed from rare, trea-
sured possessions into widely distributed texts
with contents shaped by the tastes of the bour-
geoisie and, if the London bookseller Lacking-
ton is correct, even the “poorer sort of farmer.”
Literary journals, such as the Tatler (1709)
and the Spectator (1711), religious tracts, po-
litical tracts, semipornographic smears of en-
emies and even of the French royal family,
reference works including Denis Diderot and
Jean d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, satiric novels
such as Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and scien-
tific journals that published research for natu-
ral philosophers and also instrument makers,
along with broadsides and newspapers, all cul-
tivated the interests of a growing reading public
and, when necessary, eluded barriers set down

by government censors as politically incendiary
or obscene.
Books were as much weapons as forms of en-
tertainment. Political pamphlets, such as Thomas
Paine’s Common Sense (1776) and The Rights
of Man (1791), proved the revolutionary poten-
tial of Enlightenment thought, as both writings
inflamed the passion for liberty that erupted in
both the American Revolution and the French
Revolution. The violent excesses of the French
Revolution created backlashes in America and
Europe, leading to the suppression of newspa-
pers, pamphlets, and books as well as the sup-
pression of societies such as the Free Masons
connected to secularism and freethinking. Fol-
lowing the Napoleonic Wars as Europe regained
stability, censorship control receded. However,
books continued to be censored if they were re-
garded as overly bawdy or licentious.
In the nineteenth century, along with ris-
ing public literacy and education, book and
periodical production became industries ad-
vanced by new technologies, including rotary
steam presses, stereotyped plates, and cheaper
methods of making paper and bookbindings.
Improved roads and railroads made it cheaper
and easier to distribute printed material of all
sorts from big-city publishing centers to small
towns and villages. Industrial production of-
fered cheaper copies of books as well as peri-
odicals and newspapers, which competed with
books for readers. Even families that were far
from well-to-do could afford a small collection of
books. Chapbooks were hawked on the streets,
and numerous periodicals carried serialized fic-
tion from authors such as Charles Dickens and
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, with book volumes soon
following. Authors such as James Fenimore Coo-
per, Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, and Charles Dick-
ens were translated into a variety of languages
and earned a wide international following. In-
deed, the novel developed alongside the growth
of the middle class in Europe and in America.
Literacy and reading habits were not lim-
ited to the upper or middling classes. Industri-
alization and urbanization required a literate
workforce. In Britain, Germany, France, Italy,
the United States, and elsewhere, whether mo-
tivated by a socialist agenda to ensure the dig-
nity of workers or the republican theory that the
EDUCATION AND LITERACY | 239
voting public must be well informed and “vir-
tuous,” reading came to be viewed as a means
of self-improvement. Science was a topic of
widespread fascination, reflected in the nine-
teenth-century public’s taste for lectures, books,
periodicals, and science-related articles in news-
papers. Newspapers and periodicals that catered
to specific audiences such as women, African
Americans, immigrant populations, and workers
were also common by the late nineteenth cen-
tury in the United States.
With the implementation of formal public
education, there was an increase in the demand
for educational texts. Compulsory education in
France had begun in 1793 but did not become
a reality until the 1880s. Some scholars have as-
serted that based on the ability to sign wills, liter-
acy in the United States among property-owning
males was close to 100 percent by the time of
the American Revolution. Compulsory education
laws were first enacted in Massachusetts (1852)
and New York (1853), but it was not until World
War I that most states provided compulsory free
education. In Britain, compulsory education
emerged via legislative reforms. After 1870, most
of Europe had compulsory public education. Brit-
ain achieved 90 percent literacy rates.
Public education was enhanced when pub-
lic lending libraries appeared in America and in
Britain after 1850. Prior to this, libraries were
private and not as accessible to working people
(for example, the Library Company of which
Benjamin Franklin was one founder in Philadel-
phia, 1731). Readers often shared books in read-
ing circles or at home, and a single volume would
often be read by several people. Novels were the
most popular books distributed by subscription
libraries. But as the popularity of lyceum clubs in
early-nineteenth-century Britain and the United
States indicates, with visiting lecturers offering
perspectives on current knowledge, numerous
topics such as philosophy, science, politics, spiri-
tualism, and religion also intrigued the reading
public. In the United States and Protestant Eu-
rope, the Bible was a perennial best-seller.
In Asia, the development of publishing in
India was hindered by the great diversity of In-
dia’s languages. During British rule, however,
the introduction of modern printing presses in
India’s major cities (the first printing press had
240 | ERA 7: 1750–1914 n SociEtY and culturE
been established in Goa by the Portuguese in
the 1560s), advances in education, and increased
use of local languages rather than Arabic, Per-
sian, or Sanskrit led to the appearance of India’s
first newspapers as well as an Indian publish-
ing industry that produced magazines, journals,
Western works, works of social and political
commentary, and works of fiction. Somewhat
similarly, increased contact with the West and
the adoption of the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-
1800s gave rise to what is called the Tanzimat
era of Turkish literature, in which publishing
houses began producing print material in many
different genres and forms, including many
works geared specifically for reading by women
and children.
China had a long literary and scholarly tra-
dition connected to Confucian philosophy and
the long-standing civil service exams that both
gentry and some gifted commoners trained for,
as passing these exams at different regional lev-
els permitted employment in the government
bureaucracy. Novels blossomed during the Ming
period (1388–1644), with popular tales about ban-
dits, judges, adventures, and erotica. At the turn
of the eighteenth century, the city of Chengdu
had 10 major publishing houses, Beijing had 100
publishing houses, and wealthy merchants es-
tablished some free public libraries. From 1773
to 1783, under orders of the Qianlong emperor,
the entire scholarly community helped compile
The Four Treasuries (history, classics, philoso-
phy, literature), a compendium of knowledge in
numerous fields of specialties that dwarfed the
work of the French encyclopedists, their con-
temporaries, collecting together 3,500 annotated
works of knowledge in 36,000 volumes. Seven
handwritten copies were created by scribes and
housed as separate collections in various imperial
palaces and in several libraries open to scholars.
China’s contact and conflict with Western pow-
ers in the nineteenth century also prompted the
writings of the Self-Strengthening Movement,
which argued for a balance between moderniza-
tion (that is, Western influences, technologies,
and weaponry) and tradition.
The Japanese, with their long history of ar-
tistic and literary excellence, were exposed
to Western culture through Dutch trade and
schools. During the Edo period (1603–1868)
printing flourished, and public tastes encour-
aged the wide circulation of printed material.
Novels of the Edo period and the Meiji period
(1868–1912) often included beautifully rendered
color woodblock prints that folded out from
the frontispiece pages. By the 1860s, Western
influence thoroughly intersected with a literate
culture in Japan. The Kaigai Shimbun, which
provided Japanese readers with foreign news,
began publication in 1865 at the end of the Edo
period. Numerous other mass-circulation news-
papers appeared in the decades that followed.
Bungei Kurabu, a magazine for women, also
became popular at the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury. Reading Western works became a crucial
practice as the Japanese in the Meiji era sought
to avoid being overrun by foreign powers and to
adapt Western technologies and learning so as
to position Japan as a regional and world power.
—Robert McParland
Bibliography
Allen, James Smith. In the Public Eye: A History of
Reading in Modern France, 1800–1914. Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-
Rrevolutionary France. New York: Norton,
1995.
Kornicki, Peter. The Book in Japan: A Cultural His-
tory from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth
Century. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
2000.
Jordan, John O., and Robert L. Patten, eds. Literature
in the Marketplace: Nineteenth Century British
Publishing and Reading Practices. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Porter, Roy. English Society in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury. New York: Penguin, 1990.
Quay, Sarah E., and Gabrielle Watling. Cultural His-
tory of Reading. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood,
2008.
Vincent, David. Literacy and Popular Culture: Eng-
land, 1750–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1989.
Public Libraries
Although libraries have existed for several thou-
sand years, they were reserved for the higher
social classes and took the form of private,
school, or research libraries. The first public li-
braries were established in Great Britain, North