Colonial printers, as we would expect, reported domestic events entirely from the perspective of the European settlers who were their only readers. They did, however, devote considerable space to two groups of non-Europeans who warily coexisted in the New World with the settlers: the Native American tribes and African slaves. The lone edition of Benjamin Harris’ Publick Occurrences (commonly regarded as the first newspaper in the New World, with a publication date of September 25, 1690), contained five separate news items about the Native population in just three pages of text. In one entry, Harris wrote of two white children [...]
