First American Newspaper Published in 1690

America's first newspaper lasted exactly one issue. On September 25, 1690, printer Benjamin Harris published Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick in Boston, a four-page broadsheet that the colonial government immediately suppressed. The paper's entire print run was confiscated and destroyed, but its brief existence established a principle that authorities would spend the next century trying to contain. Harris was an experienced troublemaker. He had published a radical anti-Catholic newspaper in London called Domestick Intelligence before fleeing to Boston in 1686 to escape prosecution. Publick Occurrences was intended as a monthly publication, and Harris left the fourth page blank so subscribers could add their own news before passing it along. The content was a mix of war reporting, local news, and gossip. Harris covered King William's War against the French and their Native American allies, reported on a suicide in Watertown, described a smallpox outbreak, and included an item alleging that the king of France had an affair with his daughter-in-law. The colonial authorities were less concerned with the scandalous content than with the fact that Harris had published without a license. Four days after publication, the Governor and Council of Massachusetts Bay Colony banned the paper, declaring that it had been printed "without the least Privity or Countenance of Authority" and contained "Reflections of a very high nature." Every available copy was ordered destroyed. Harris never published another issue. The suppression of Publick Occurrences reflected a governing class that viewed printing as a privilege to be controlled, not a right to be exercised. Licensed newspapers would not appear in America until 1704, when John Campbell began publishing the Boston News-Letter with the government's explicit permission. The tension between press freedom and government control that Publick Occurrences exposed would define American journalism for the next three centuries, from the Zenger trial of 1735 through the ratification of the First Amendment in 1791.