President Abraham Lincoln was shot at 9:30 p.m. on Friday, April 14, 1865, at Ford’s Theater. He was moved to a house across the street where he died at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday, April 15. The news bulletins through 2 a.m. reached the New York Herald by telegraph in time to make its first edition, making it the first national report.

Interestingly, the news is still so fresh in the first edition of the April 15 New York Herald that there is still doubt about the assassin. One dispatch describes “the person who fired the pistol” as a “man about thirty years of age, about five feet nine, spare built, fair skin, dark hair, apparently bushy, with a large mustache.”

The very next sentence, however, quotes a witness who identified the shooter. “Laura Keene and the leader of the orchestra declare that they recognized him as J. Wilkes Booth the actor, and a rabid secessionist. Whoever he was, it is plainly evident that he thoroughly understood the theatre and all the approaches and modes of escape to the stage.”

An interior report isn’t so quick to name Booth — “The assassin had not been arrested up to the hour of our latest despatches. Who he is is not positively known, though suspicion points strongly to a certain individual.”

Perhaps the most bloodcurdling report from the Herald’s first edition was the news of Lincoln’s brain oozing out of the bullet hole in his head.

Historic newspapers are the first drafts of history.  And this fist edition — known as the 2 a.m. edition — of the April 15, 1865 New York Herald is certainly the first draft of a major event, printed just hours after Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theater.

“During World War I, in the winter of 1914, on the battlefields of Flanders, one of the most unusual events in all of human history took place,” according to the Snopes verification of what is called the Christmas Truce of 1914.

The Germans, who had been engaged in fierce trench warfare with the British and French, spontaneously erected small Christmas trees and lights outside their trenches, and began singing holiday songs. Not long after, across “no man’s land,” the British and French troops began caroling.

Slowly, soldiers left their trenches under an impromptu truce. After brief introductions, they buried their dead and settled into the traditional Christmas routine of exchanging gifts, such as cake, alcohol, postcards and tobacco.

“For a few precious moments there was peace on earth and good will toward men. All because the focus was on Christmas,” according to Snopes. Recognizing this rare event in history, the January 8, 1915 issue of the Daily Mirror published a group photo under the headline “An Historic Group”. As the caption states, “Foes became friends on Christmas Day.”

Throughout Europe during the 1500s, experiments were made in printed news, such as illustrated news broadsides that appealed to a mostly illiterate population. Frans Hogenberg was the first to successfully build a career in illustrated journalism.

According to the Hollstein Studies in Prints and Printmaking, Frans Hogenberg moved from England to Cologne in 1570 and founded a publishing house. With a large staff, Hogenberg’s scope of work moved beyond maps, cityscapes and portraits.

Starting in 1570, Hogenberg began work on broadsheets illustrating historic political and military events that took place in Europe during the 16th century.

Knowing that Hogenberg’s illustrated journalism career began in 1570, only his engravings of events dated after 1570 can truly be considered news broadsides because they were published in a timely manner, often only weeks after the event occurred. His pre-1570 work is more accurately labeled historical broadsides.

Shown above are four examples of Hogenberg broadsides (click the photo to enlarge).

Upper left: The knights tournament at which Gabriel, Comte de Montgomery, mortally wounds King Henri II by his lance. Dated June 30, 1559.

Upper right: The beheading of Philip de Montmorency, Count of Horn, in the main square at Brussels, which signified the start of hostilities in the Eighty Years’ War. Dated June 4, 1568.

Lower left: The military coup in Brussels that began the process of that ended the Pacification of Ghent. Dated September 5, 1576.

Lower right: The Sack of Antwerp, known as the Spanish Fury, during the Eighty Years’ War. The Spanish Fury was “one of the most notable deeds of blood upon record — [7000] human beings butchered and houses burned — how the city was plundered,” as reported 300 years later in the November 25, 1876 issue of the New York Times. Dated November 4, 1576 with contemporary hand coloring.

Since Hogenberg’s career in illustrated journalism began in 1570, the top two examples are more accurately considered historical broadsides while the bottom two were engraved weeks after the actual events and therefore safe to call illustrated news broadsides.

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I was honored to learn that Gary Gregory, founder of Lessons on Liberty and one of the participants in the 1770 reenactment, keeps the Rag Linen app on his iPhone. In fact, I was so flattered, I asked if I could snap a quick photo (at left, click to enlarge). Moments after snapping this pic of colonial iPhone usage, I found another colonial sipping a McDonald’s beverage. I love the juxtaposition.

UPDATE (3/10/10): Coincidentally, the same day this post was published, Colonial Williamsburg launched two free iPhone apps, including one called “Today in the 1770s“.

According to John Doggett Jr.’s 1849 enhanced edition of the Patriot account, during that March 12 meeting a “report made by John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren, and others” was presented to the citizens of Boston.  “The whole presenting, it is believed, the most complete and authentic account which has been published of the massacre.”

This report by Hancock, Adams, Warren, et al. was also published in the March 13 to 20, 1770 issue of the Essex Gazette, printed in Salem, Massachusetts, about 18 miles north of Boston. To help commemorate this Friday’s 240th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, below are 24 images from that famous edition of the Essex Gazette.

According to the Origins of the American Revolution by John Chester Miller (1959):

“One of the chief reasons why Americans had rejoiced in the peace terms of 1763 was that the West seemed to have been thrown open to their expansion. The removal of the French menace had, it was believed, made possible at long last the settlement of the American West by British subjects… Since the Indians had taken to the warpath in 1763 partly because they fears they were about to be deprived of their lands by the advancing line of white settlement, the British government issued a proclamation which established a line of demarcation — roughly the summit of the Alleghenies — westward of which no British subject could purchase land or settle. Hastily drawn and designed only to meet a temporary emergency, the Proclamation of 1763 became the foundation of a permanent British policy toward the American West.”

To many colonists, particularly those on the frontier, who were often called the Piedmont, Mother England was being over protective of her American children. According to The Real History of the American Revolution: A New Look at the Past by Alan Axelrod, “after the Proclamation of 1763, [colonists] began to think of themselves as victims of tyranny.”

Below is the first report of the Proclamation of 1763 as published in the October 4 to 8, 1763 issue of the London Gazette.

According to Thomas Hutchinson and the Origins of the American Revolution by Andrew Stephen Walmsley (1999):

Rarely in American history has a political figure been so pilloried and despised by his contemporaries as Thomas Hutchinson… Vilified, stigmatized, and ridiculed, he eventually became the pre-eminent bete noire or scapegoat of America’s most vigorous radical activists. By 1774 he was arguably the most unpopular man in North America. His name had become synonymous in the popular imagination with detested loyalism, hated toryism and treason… One of the greatest challenges to confront Massachusetts’ radicals throughout the years of imperial crisis was to develop an effective formula for ousting Hutchinson. Without him as their foil, Boston’s radicals would have had a far more difficult time engineering the crisis that produced the Revolution.

The Hutchinson letters affair was one of the most famous controversies tied to Hutchinson, as well as Benjamin Franklin. The Hutchinson letters that Franklin leaked to his friend in Boston were eventually published in June 1773 in the Boston Gazette. Likely used as war propaganda, the New-England Chronicle republished the Hutchinson letters in June and July of 1775 — click here to read some of the Thomas Hutchinson letters printed in the June 29 to July 6, 1775 issue of the New-England Chronicle.

Equally interesting about the Hutchinson letters affair is the Benjamin Franklin confession (but no apology).  According to Walter Isaacson’s biography on Franklin:

In December, two men engaged in an inconclusive duel in Hyde Park after one accused the other of leaking the letters.  When a rematch seemed imminent, Franklin felt he had to step forward… he wrote… a letter to the London Chronicle on Christmas Day (published December 27). But he did not apologize.

Franklin’s public confession led to his appearance before the Privy Council, which many historians point to as the moment when Franklin officially stopped supporting Britain and became an American revolutionary.

Below is Benjamin Franklin’s public confession to leaking the Hutchinson letters as published in the March 7, 1774 Boston Gazette.