Broadsides: Popular Voices?

Broadsides are single-sheet printed documents. Printers produced them in many situations: for government proclamations, for commercial uses, for civic and religious ceremonies, for academic publications, and for popular entertainment. Their texts could be quite brief, or long and complex. Because of their “ephemeral” and occasional nature, many or most are now lost.^[1] These examples from Kislak Center holdings suggest the range of Philadelphia broadsides printed during the Revolutionary era. We can “hear” some popular voices, and points of view not represented in other sources, when reading them.

Philadelphia’s “Tea Party”

Philadelphia was one of four port cities to which the East India Company sent shipments of tea in 1773, testing the Tea Act which required the payment of taxes upon arrival. In October and November, Philadelphians including Benjamin Rush, Thomas Mifflin, and printer William Bradford organized to prevent the landing of the tea delivery in Philadelphia. The ship Polly was turned back, without violence. One broadside here by “Regulus,” calls on “Freemen” to refuse the tea shipment, and another from a “Committee of Tarring and Feathering” warns river pilots and the captain. Philadelphian resistance influenced Boston’s own response in December, leading to the more famous “Boston Tea Party.”^[2]

1. Overview: Pettegree, “Broadsheets: Single-Sheet Publishing in the First Age of Print. Typology and Typography,” in Broadsheets: Single-sheet Printing in the First Age of Print, Brill. ↑

2. A Rising People, 21. Ammerman, “The Tea Crisis and its Consequences, through 1775,” Greene and Pole, A Companion, 196–197. ↑