Correspondence
Papers of the period ran letters. A reader wrote to the printer, the printer printed what he thought worth printing, and a good deal of what survives of ordinary eighteenth-century opinion survives because somebody sat down and did that.
The New America Times does the same. Write to the printer about anything in the paper — an item you doubt, something you know more about than we do, a question, or an argument.
Opens a short form. Your letter comes to the publisher, not to a public page.
Nothing appears automatically. There is no comment thread under the issues and there is not going to be one. Letters come to the publisher, who reads them.
Some will be printed in a later number, as a letter to the printer, in the paper. If yours is one of them you will be asked first, and you can say no, or ask to be printed without your name. Tell us in the letter if you would rather not be printed at all — that is a perfectly ordinary thing to say and it will be respected.
A correction is the most useful letter you can send. If the paper has got something wrong, we do not go back and quietly change it — a published issue is never revised. The correction runs in a later number, the way a printer of the period would have run it. So telling us is the only thing that works, and it is worth doing.
Nothing past the current date. The paper knows only what was known on the day it bears, and that is the whole of the thing. If you write to say what happens at Trenton in December, you have not told the printer anything he can use — and if it were printed, you would have spoiled it for every other reader.
Hindsight is the one commodity this paper is not in the market for. Everything else is welcome.
The form asks for an address. Give it if you want to be told when there is a new number, and leave it out if you do not — a letter is welcome either way, and nothing is sent to anyone who did not ask.
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