The development of the intellectual life of the middle colonies, so far as literary results—such as they were—are concerned, is best seen in Moses C. Tyler’s History of American Literature (vol. ii. ch. 16).[574] The list by Haven in Thomas’s Hist. of Printing (vol. ii.) reveals the extent of the publications of the period; but for Pennsylvania the record is made admirably full in Charles R. Hildeburn’s Century of Printing,—issues of the press in Pennsylvania, 1685-1784.[575]
William Bradford, the father of printing in the middle colonies, removed to New York in 1693, where he died in 1752, having maintained the position of the leading printer in that province, where he started, in 1725, the N. Y. Gazette, the earliest New York newspaper.[576] His son, Andrew Bradford (born 1686, died 1742), was the founder of the newspaper press in Pennsylvania, and began the American Weekly Mercury in 1719, and the American Magazine in 1741.[577]
The records of the publication of Franklin and his press have been more than once carefully made,[578] and Col. William Bradford, grandson of the first William, has been fitly commemorated in the Life of him by Wallace.[579]
The general histories of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey have been sufficiently described elsewhere.[580] The documentary collections of New York State have likewise been explained;[581] but the historical literature respecting the province and State has never been bibliographically arranged. The city of New York has some careful histories of its own.[582] The capital, Albany, by reason of the attention of its devoted antiquarian publishers, has recently had its own bibliography traced.[583] The extent of the other local histories of the State, particularly as far as the Dutch period was represented in it, has been already indicated;[584] but the list as touching the period covered by the present chapter could be much enlarged.[585]
The several official and documentary collections published by Pennsylvania have been described elsewhere.[586] Something of her local history has been also indicated, but the greater part of the interest of this class of historical records falls within the period of the present volume.[587]
Respecting the histories of Philadelphia, since the memoranda were noted in Vol. III. (p. 509), the material gathered by Thompson Westcott has been augmented by the labors of Col. J. Thomas Scharf, and the elaborate History of Philadelphia (Philad., 1884) with this joint authorship has been issued in three large volumes. Two chapters (xiii. and xv.) in the first volume cover in the main the period now dealt with. There is still a good deal to be gleaned from the old Annals of Philadelphia, by John F. Watson, of which there is a new edition, with revisions and additions by Willis P. Hazard.[588] It is a work somewhat desultory in character and unskilful in arrangement, but it contains a great body of facts.[589]
