Communication in The Americas and their Influence

Whether the quest was for riches, as in the Spanish incursion into the New World, or for a life free from the constraints of the homeland, which motivated the settlement of most of Anglophone North America, religion played an important role. When the Spanish decided to follow plunder with colonization, taming the indigenous peoples through religious conversion became an imperative. In 1539, less than one hundred years after Gutenberg's invention of moveable-type printing, the bishop of Mexico established the first printing office in the New World. Books of religious instruction helped Franciscans and Jesuits spread Catholicism. They made religious conversions at a rate that far surpassed the later efforts of Protestants in North America, largely because of Catholicism's greater capacity to accommodate indigenous beliefs. The teaching of literacy was not a high priority in Catholic proselytizing at this time, except for those natives destined for ordination.

The seventeenth-century Puritans, in contrast, attempted to teach peoples under their purview to read various religious texts translated into the languages of the tribes in question, but the project was eventually abandoned. The Latin alphabet has only limited phonetic utility when used to transcribe non–Indo-European languages. In 1821, however, the Cherokee Sequoya devised an indigenous writing system by modifying the Latin alphabet to represent syllables of the Cherokee language. Often referred to as an alphabet, this eighty-five-character script is, technically speaking, a syllabary. At one point it was even used for newspapers; after falling into disuse, it is now enjoying renewed interest. Other Native American groups, such as the Cree and Inuit, have also developed syllabaries.

Whether brought by Puritans, Quakers, Mennonites, or any of the other Protestant groups that settled North America, the influence of the Reformation was profound. Idolatry was rejected and vernacular literacy was encouraged so that all could have direct access to the word of God. Imported Epistles were soon supplanted by Bibles, psalm books, and catechisms minted in America after print shops were set up (1640) in Boston and Cambridge. The literacy rate in colonial New England at this time has been estimated at about 60 percent for adult males, with a figure of about half that for women. It was somewhat less in the southern colonies—50 percent for males and 25 percent for females—given the more agrarian (and, in some places, Catholic) nature of the South, where the education system tended, apart from the segment that catered to the elite, to be less well developed.

The eighteenth century saw a gradual rise in colonial literacy, along with the publication of texts besides those relating to religion—schoolbooks, professional and technical manuals, and eventually the political tracts that would inspire the American Revolution. By 1790 American editions of English works began to appear, to be followed in several decades by a national tradition of fiction and poetry. Throughout the eighteenth century, books were relatively costly. Access to them was abetted by the establishment of subscription libraries, the prototype being the Philadelphia Library Company, established in 1731, largely through the efforts of Benjamin Franklin. Newspapers also facilitated the dissemination of ideas throughout the century, beginning in 1700 with Boston postmaster John Campbell's hand-copied news sheet, which went to print in 1704 as the Boston News-Letter. Within a generation a dozen such publications were available, and throughout the remainder of the century growth would be exponential.

In the decades leading up to 1776, a growing volume of printed matter urged resistance to British authority. Perhaps the most notorious document in this regard is Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published as the revolution began, on 9 January 1776. Although the ideals of those advocating independence included free speech and a free press, pro-British newspapers expressing Loyalist sentiments were often suppressed. By the time of the revolution there was near universal literacy in the northern colonies. Nevertheless, the importance of the oral tradition cannot be discounted. What was read was discussed and augmented by speeches in taverns, meeting halls, and other public places.