About
The New America Times is a daily paper of the birth of America, published on the 250th anniversary of each issue's date, six days a week from Tuesday, 1 October 1776. There is no Sunday issue.
Each issue may only report what a printer in Philadelphia could have known by the close of the day before its date: an issue dated the 1st closes with the post (the mail) of the 30th. A report that was believed at the time and later proved false is printed as it was believed, and corrected in a later issue. You follow events day by day, as readers did then.
The events are real, drawn from all sources available now.
The New America Times is published by Jeremy Heckerling.
The paper is written by AI. The research, the selection and the prose are done by a machine, following rules set by the publisher. The publisher also sets the long story lines the paper follows across months and years, including how the period treated certain subjects. He does not write the issues or review them before they go out.
This is not journalism. It is history told in the form of a newspaper. Every claim is traced to a source before it is printed, and a claim that cannot be traced is not printed.
Each issue has to pass a set of automated tests: that nothing in it could have reached Philadelphia after its deadline, allowing for how long such news took to travel; that every item names the source it came from; that the issue draws on more than one kind of source; and that anything invented carries a mark. Then a separate fact-check is done by a different AI model that knows nothing about how the issue was made. It is asked to confirm that nothing in the issue breaks the rules on timing or sourcing. A full bibliography is kept for every issue.
† An advertisement invented for this paper is marked with a dagger at the head of the notice. The advertiser, the goods and the terms are ours. Everything else in the advertising columns is reproduced word for word from the papers of the day, and the people named in them really placed them.
Nothing concerning an enslaved person or a bound servant is ever invented. Every such notice, whether a sale, a hire, a term of years or a reward for someone who had escaped, is reproduced from the record. We include these advertisements because they are a record of real people.
The printer. Davidson Signal, the printer named at the foot of each issue, is a pen name, and the Sign of the Wolf and Bear is an invented tavern. The printer speaks only about the paper, never about the news: which mail arrived or didn't, what is missing and why, and corrections of earlier mistakes.
A printer in 1776 set type and sold advertising. He had no reporters and wrote very little himself, only short local notices: a ship arriving, a fire, a theft. Everything else he printed as it came to him: the resolutions of Congress, word for word; letters from the army and from other towns; official orders and proclamations; and news copied from other papers.
This paper does the same. Congress appears as a run of “Resolved, That…” because that is how Congress announced its decisions. A battle arrives as an extract from a letter by someone who was there. Nobody sums it up for you.
A daily. There were some thirty-seven newspapers in America when the war began in 1775, nearly all four-page weeklies. The Pennsylvania Evening Post came out three times a week, about as close to a daily as the colonies had.
Headlines and order. None of them used headlines. Stories ran one after another under a dateline, in the order the mail brought them. The section headings here are modern, and so is the order: the main items come first, and short items run together at the end.
The type. The typeface, by contrast, is historical. The paper is set in IM Fell DW Pica, Igino Marini's digital version of the types Bishop John Fell bought for the University of Oxford in the 1670s, which were still in use in the eighteenth century. They were cut by hand and digitized from printed pages, so the letters are slightly irregular, like ink on damp paper. There is no bold: bold type made to match ordinary text type dates from the 1840s, and the Fell types have none. Where a modern page would use bold, this one uses small capitals.
Some features of the paper follow from the city and date we chose, not from our own preferences.
By autumn 1776 a printer might stay neutral privately, but a neutral paper could not survive. Hugh Gaine advertised his New York press as "open to publication from ALL PARTIES", and the Sons of Liberty stormed his shop. Christopher Sower, a Dunker bishop at Germantown, opposed the war on principle and would not swear to either side; he lost his press and his property and spent his last years binding books. A neutral printer in 1776 would be unrealistic.
Papers friendly to the Crown had already gone from most of the colonies, and inside British lines the Patriot papers closed instead. In most places, the side a paper took depended on which army was nearest. Philadelphia in early October 1776 was one of the few places where the question was still open. James Humphreys Jr. had printed the Loyalist Pennsylvania Ledger there since January 1775; its prospectus had promised "a free and impartial weekly news paper." He was still printing on 1 October, and closed the paper on 30 November and left town.
So we chose the side that let a paper exist in Philadelphia at that date.
A paper truly undecided about who was right would have been more interesting. It could not have been published then, and since we know how the war ended, writing one now would be pretense.
Congress sat in Philadelphia, and a paper reporting on Congress has to be close enough to follow it. Much of each issue comes from the Journals of Congress, naval and state records, and letters. Its voice comes from Philadelphia's own newspapers: 336 issues of the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Pennsylvania Evening Post, from 1775 to 1781.
Not New York. The British took it in September 1776 and held it until 1783, which is why Gaine's press moved to Newark and then returned to print on the British side. A New York paper in October 1776 was either printing in exile or printing for the British.
This paper carries notices about enslaved people. Slavery was legal on both sides, so staying neutral between Congress and the King would not have meant staying neutral about slavery.
There was no paper doing otherwise to follow. Jordan E. Taylor, who studied a century of American newspaper advertising, could not identify a single printer who refused, on principle, to run advertisements offering enslaved people for sale. Christopher Sower, the pacifist mentioned above, personally opposed slavery; we haven't established what his own paper carried.
I set up the AI that writes this paper to print the facts as they were known in Philadelphia on each issue's date, and I built in checks, including an independent fact-check, to catch mistakes. I hope it lets you enjoy living through this history as it happened.
But I am not a historian, and these issues are not reviewed by historians. The paper is for enjoyment. I hope each one follows my rules perfectly, but they are not a work of reference. I read each issue as it comes out, the same as any other reader.
If you enjoy this, you might also enjoy The Sporting Chronicles: American sport, as it happened, one week at a time from 1919.
These sources support the claims on this page. Each issue's own sources are in its bibliography.