Volcano Weekly Ledger (MODULE 7)

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn93051027/1855-10-27/ed-1/seq-2/

My favorite piece I read is the one I wrote about the most in this post. It is from a publication named the Volcano Weekly Ledger, comes from a town aptly named Volcano, and was published on the date of October 27^th, 1855 in the state of California. Going into reading this I have not heard of the town named Volcano and was not sure it still existed today. Lo and behold it still exists today with a population of 115 according to the 2010 census. Before finding out the demographical information of this town, I was intrigued as to why they did not seem to have any information on historical events and instead seemed to be paragraphs upon paragraphs on conversations/hearsay. When they mentioned apologizing for their family being sick and not getting the paper out on time, that is when I became suspicious of the population size. The part about Volcano being a “one-horse town” further confirmed my suspicions.

The year 1855 was smack dab in the middle of when the newspaper business really made its mark on reporting key and important events. About a decade beforehand the first eyewitness account of American wars was being published and reported. While that is important history, this article seems to be talking more about meaningless events such as juggling and a conversation between a mother and someone who knows, not is, Benjamin Franklin. This newspaper claims to be a neutral paper, which by all means it completely is. It is not really giving information on critical current events and so can not really give a bias towards them. However, that is if we go by our modern terms on what qualifies as an important current event. We do have news sites that give trivial information and could be seen more as sites to find quizzes that tell you “what Harry Potter character you are”. While the article “Newspapers and the Press” by David Jamison goes over the historical achievements newspapers have accomplished, it shows us humans have not really changed over the years and we are entertained by meaningless distractions that help us navigate through the day to day. We are born on this Earth and all we do is wait. We wait in lines, we wait to have fun, we wait for death, so coming up with meaningless distractions is really all we have.