ABSTRACT
Although a proposal to establish a workers’ magazine was circulated by William Manning in 1797, the rst U.S. labor papers were not published until the late 1820s. Some fty labor papers were launched from 1828 to the mid-1830s, most in the industrializing northeastern part of the country. These early papers tended to concentrate on the emerging labor movement’s political concerns-winning the right to organize and strike in the face of prosecutions for unlawful association, shorter working hours, free public education, abolition of imprisonment for debt, and similar reforms. Like the movement they served, these were eclectic papers, which opened their columns not only to news of the nascent unions but to the wide range of reform thought sweeping the country as the economy shifted from artisan and local to industrial and national production. (Indeed, many of these early papers were produced by printers who saw the traditions of their craft collapsing around them.) Most of these papers were weeklies or monthlies, but the New York Daily Sentinel was published (with a brief stint as a semiweekly) from February 13, 1830, until 1833.
