News

Rudimentary newspapers, published late in the fifteenth century in Nuremberg, Cologne, and Augsburg, have spread throughout Germany; they appear in Venice in 1562.

The world's first regularly published newspaper, by Johann Carolus, debuts in October 1605 in Strassburg as Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien (”Collection of all distinguished and commemorable news”).

The first Dutch newspaper, Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, is published in June 1618 in Amsterdam.

A regular weekly publication, it can be called the first broadsheet paper, because it is issued in folio-size.

Before this, news periodicals had been pamphlets in quarto-size. (The paper carries no imprint of the printer or the publisher, but based on similar papers published later, it was probably printed by Joris Veseler and published and edited by Caspar van Hilten. The exact date of the publication is not known, but the dates of the news items suggest that it was probably printed between June 14 and 18, 1618.)

The first issue presented news from four different sources, including Venice and Prague. (English typographer, designer and historian of printing Stanley Morison and some other authors regard the Courante as the world’s first proper newspaper. In their view, the earlier news periodicals, such as the German Relation: aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien and the Avisa Relation oder Zeitung, were not newspapers but pamphlets or newsbooksThey argue that the Courante was the first to express the typographic conventions that have been associated with newspapers ever since.)

Private newspapers in Ming Dynasty China are first mentioned in 1582.

The Beijing Gazette in 1638 makes an official switch in its production process of newspapers, from woodblock printing to movable type printing.

The Oxford Gazette is first published on November 7, 1665.

It is today, as The London Gazette, one of the official journals of record of the British government in which certain statutory notices are required to be published, the oldest surviving English newspaper and the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United Kingdom.

Several new German universities are founded, some soon considered among Europe's best.

An increasingly literate public makes possible a jump in the number of journals and newspapers.

At the end of the seventeenth century, most books printed in Germany were in Latin; by the end of the next century, all but five percent are in German.

The eighteenth century also sees a refinement of the German language and a flowering of German literature with the appearance of such figures as Gotthold Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller.

German music also reaches great heights with the Bach family, George Frederick Handel, Joseph Haydn, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Slovenian prosperity by the end of the eighteenth century has yielded a self-reliant middle class that sends its sons to study in Vienna and Paris.

They return steeped in the views of the Enlightenment and bent on rational examination of their own culture.

Slovenian intellectuals begin writing in Slovenian rather than German, and they introduce the idea of a Slovenian nation.

Between 1788 and 1791, Anton Linhart writes an anti-feudal, anticlerical history of the Slovenes that depicts them for the first time as a single people.

In 1797 Father Valentin Vodnik composes Slovenian poetry and founds the first Slovenian newspaper.

A guiding motive and justification for Spain's conquests in America is cited at this time as the conversion of the indigenous population to Christianity; it is cited still today by traditionalists who reject the pervasive Black Legend of Spanish cruelty to the native inhabitants.

Proselytism in New Granads had at least superficially been a great success, with most of the native population quickly adopting the new religion.

As elsewhere in America, the native converts had not necessarily abandoned all previous beliefs or ascribe the same meaning to Roman Catholic rituals as did Hispanic Christians, but they had conformed outwardly to those rituals, helped build churches and chapels, and showed the Roman Catholic clergy due respect.

Spanish colonizers are sometimes annoyed when a priest or friar protests against mistreatment of the native population or of enslaved blacks, but they are eager to see the church established on a solid footing in the new lands and give generously of their often ill-gotten gains to that effect.

Likewise, the Spanish state, both from sincere conviction and from a realization of the church's value as an instrument of social control, helps endow the church with property, support its missionary activity, and, to the extent possible, suppress religious dissent.

Extirpation of heresy and heretics, by burning as a last resort, is the special responsibility of the Spanish Inquisition, which has one of its three American headquarters (the least active of the three) at Cartagena.

In the late colonial period, both state support and the missionary enthusiasm of the clergy tend to diminish, but by this time the Roman Catholic Church is firmly entrenched as an institution, with roughly one priest or friar per seven hundred and fifty inhabitants, extensive property holdings, and additional wealth from investments, fees, and the compulsory payment of tithes by the faithful.

This strong position will inevitably influence the course of Colombian history after independence.

Saints' portraits and other religious themes dominate colonial painting, including much popular art of the period, and religious festivals are regular occasions for public entertainment (commonly marked by drunkenness and rowdy behavior that the clergy disapproved).

Formal education is largely in the hands of the clergy, who control the only university-level institutions and are active at other levels too.

The great majority of the population remains illiterate.

For most of the colonial period, the literate are dependent on imported reading matter because the first press is set up in Santa Fe only in 1738, and the first real newspaper does not appear until 1791.

However, the latter development coincides with a wider intellectual awakening to new currents in science and philosophy emanating from the European Enlightenment.

A leader in this movement is José Celestino Mutis, a Spanish-born priest who settled in Santa Fe and won acclaim from European scientists for his work in studying botanical species of the viceroyalty.

Several criollo disciples of Mutis will be active participants in the early nineteenth-century movement for independence.

Benjamin Harris, an ardent Anabaptist and Whig, had published argumentative pamphlets in London, especially ones attacking Roman Catholics and Quakers, and in 1679 had joined Titus Oates in “exposing” the Popish Plot.

To escape fines and further imprisonment, he had fled in 1686, to Boston, where he has established a successful bookstore and coffeehouse with his son Vavasour.

His newspaper, Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick (Sept. 25, 1690), the first newspaper printed in the colonies, is suppressed by Boston authorities after one issue.

Sometime before 1690, Harris had published The New-England Primer, adapted from his earlier, savagely political speller, The Protestant Tutor (1679); the primer will be for half a century the only elementary textbook in America.

Its eighty pages, measuring four and a half by three inches, contain woodcuts illustrating the alphabet, crude couplets, and moral texts, including the child's prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Harris returns to London and journalism in 1695.

England’s first regular daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, is published in 1702.

Commencing from Fleet Street, the paper consists of a single page with two columns.

Its founder, Edward Mallet, advertises that he intends to publish only foreign news and will not add any comments of his own, supposing other people to have "sense enough to make reflections for themselves."