Rag Linen | Online Museum of Historic Newspapers

Supplementing his weekly Massachusetts Spy newspaper, perhaps to satisfy a demand for more hard-hitting anti-British essays and illustrations, Isaiah Thomas printed the first issue of Royal American Magazine in January 1774.  The magazine was published every month until the eve of the Revolutionary War and featured Paul Revere and John Hancock among its many contributors.

“Besides the usual variety of general literature, this work contains a faithful summary of the public transactions of Boston during that eventful year, and great value is added to the work by the public documents preserved in its pages,” according to Samuel Burnside, Memoir of Isaiah Thomas, Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society.

Below is an early — possibly the earliest — advertisement for the premier issue of Royal American Magazine, as published in Thomas’ Massachusetts Spy on October 14, 1773.

At a town meeting on March 12, 1770 — one week after the Boston Massacre — James Bowdoin, Joseph Warren and Samuel Pemberton were appointed to a committee to prepare the Patriot account of the massacre.

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.