On September 25, 1690, Boston printer Benjamin Harris put out a four-page newspaper meant to run monthly; the colony banned it four days later, and no one printed another one there for fourteen years.

Benjamin Harris thought he had put England behind him.

He hadn't. He had only changed which government would eventually come for his printing press.

A bookseller who had already been pilloried once

Harris arrived in Boston in the fall of 1686 with a résumé that should have worried anyone hiring him: prosecuted in London for seditious libel, fined, pilloried, and jailed for printing pamphlets the Crown didn't care for. He opened the London Coffee-House, a bookshop and coffeehouse combined, sold primers and almanacs, and by most accounts kept his head down for four years.

Then, on September 25, 1690, he and the printer Richard Pierce produced something Boston had never seen: a newspaper, titled Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick.

What made it a newspaper and not just another broadside

Boston already had broadsides, single printed sheets nailed up or handed around. What Harris and Pierce put out was different in kind. It ran four pages, roughly the size of a modern paperback laid open, with the text set in two columns. The fourth page was left blank on purpose, so that a reader could add news of his own before passing the copy to the next person.

Harris signaled he meant to keep doing this. The masthead promised the paper would appear monthly, "or if any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener." A glut of occurrences did happen, eventually; Harris just wasn't the one reporting it.

The single surviving issue mixed a smallpox report, an account of a good harvest among Native converts in Plymouth, a suicide, and news from the war then being fought against France and its Native allies along the northern frontier. It read like a newspaper because it was doing what newspapers do: putting local trouble next to foreign trouble on the same page.

What actually got it banned

Four days after it appeared, the governor and council issued an order. Officially, the objection was procedural: Harris had printed "without the least Privity or Countenance" of authority, and the paper contained "sundry doubtful and uncertain Reports." The order forbade anyone from printing anything in the colony without a license, and it directed that every copy of the offending issue be tracked down.

That was the stated reason. It was not, on its own, a very convincing one; the previous forty years of Massachusetts printing had run on a license nobody enforced very hard. Two items in the paper were the likelier trigger.

One was military. Harris reported that the colony's Mohawk allies had handled French prisoners "in a manner too barbarous for any English to approve," and hinted that English officers had let it happen. That accusation, printed in wartime, embarrassed exactly the men who could shut a press down.

The other was gossip, and worse gossip than it sounds. Harris passed along an unverified rumor that Louis XIV of France was sleeping with his own son's wife, and that the affair had driven the son toward a plot against his father. True or not, it was the kind of item a colony at war with France's king had no interest in seeing repeated by its own printer.

Name the two together and the "no license" complaint reads less like the reason and more like the charge that was easiest to write down.

What happened to the copies, and to Harris

The council's men did their job. No second issue is known to have circulated, and for close to two centuries historians debated whether one had even been printed, since nobody in Boston seems to have kept a copy. The single surviving example turned up in London, in what is now the British Library's collection, filed among government papers rather than treasured as a first edition.

Harris didn't fight the ban. Within a year he had partnered with the printer John Allen and talked his way into the job of Printer to the Governor and Council, putting out exactly the sort of licensed material that had gotten him banned in the first place. He held that arrangement until 1695, when he sailed back to London and picked the old fights up again.

Boston went fourteen years without a second attempt. When one came, in 1704, John Campbell's Boston News-Letter opened with the words "Published by Authority" printed directly under the title, in case anyone had missed the lesson.

Was this really the first American newspaper?

The claim needs one footnote. Mexico City had a printing press decades before Boston did, and it put out occasional news sheets on events like a 1541 earthquake (single sheets, printed once, never meant to recur). Mexico's own first proper newspaper, the Gaceta de México, did not appear until 1722, thirty-two years after Harris. So the safest phrasing turns out to be the boldest one too: Publick Occurrences was the first true newspaper printed anywhere in the colonial Americas, dated and sequential and meant to keep appearing, which is recognizably the shape a newspaper still has.

Why a single issue still matters

Every press credential fight since has some version of the same argument running underneath it: is the objection to the paperwork, or to what got printed. Massachusetts in 1690 answered with a licensing order and then spent a generation making sure the next paper never tested the question again. The News-Letter's editors learned that lesson so well that their paper is, by most measures, a duller read than Harris's one issue.

A newspaper that manages one edition and gets read for three hundred thirty years afterward has done something an obedient monthly rarely does. It picked a fight worth losing.

Sources

• Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, Wikipedia, accessed 2026
• Mass Moments, "First Newspaper Published in the Colonies," Mass Humanities
• Smithsonian Magazine, "Why the Debut Issue of America's First Newspaper Was Also the Publication's Last"
• GenealogyBank, "America's First Newspaper: Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, 1690"