December 9

Ever since the advent of printing presses with movable type in the 15th century, newspapers have been offered to the reading public. Actually, it would be a bit more accurate to say that since the introduction of these presses in the middle of the 1400s papers featuring news have been offered to the literate members of many communities. Generally, these were broadsheets with no fixed schedule of publication and circulation was limited for the most part to bulletin boards, walls of taverns and other similar locations where a sheet of paper could be tacked up. It was inevitable that the idea of publishing a proper newspaper would eventually strike someone. I mean, they had all these words just lying around cluttering things up and somebody had to come up with a way to get rid of at least some of them. On the 9th of December in 1793, Noah Webster began publication of the American Minerva, the City of New York’s first daily newspaper. Webster would achieve lasting literary fame when on January 15, 1806 he published his book “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language” which remains in print today as Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.