Newspapers.

In 1784, when John Filson finished his manuscript on the history of Kentucky, he had to travel back to Delaware in order to get it published; at that time there were no printing presses in the West. Two years later the Pittsburgh Gazette was published, the first newspaper printed in the trans-Allegheny territories. John Scull, the publisher of the Gazette, also printed the first book west of the Alleghenies, the third volume of Hugh Henry Brackenridge's novel, Modern Chivalry (1793). In the meantime, using a printing press carried from Philadelphia by wagon and boat, John Bradford, in 1787, started the second Western newspaper, the Kentucke Gazette. Since these newspapers often lacked up-to-date national and international news, the editor often published articles with a literary bent. Essays in the style of the English eighteenth-century essayists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and the local "poets...