Every Friday, the Internet Scout report is published online and by free subscription. https://scout.wisc.edu/report The publication highlights web sites and software that can assist with computing, such as changing a file from one format to another. One of the items that came in today is a website that publishes an item of news from the Williamsburg, Virginia paper in the 1770's. I often find that learning what was on people's minds centuries ago helps give perspective to what is on our mind's today.
To our ears today, this is formal language, of a sort that we don't expect in a news item today:
Today in the 1770s: May 18 WILLIAMSBURG, May 18, 1775.
(From the Williamsburg Gazette of that date)
We understand that private letters are received in this city, which inform that the troops at Boston were exceedingly justifiable as to their conduct on a late alarming occasion and that there would not have been the least bloodshed, had not the impertinence and ill behaviour of the provincials urged them to take up arms in their own defence. The printer will not be so indecent as to declare that the authors of these letters lie; but this he will venture to say, that they have not only contradicted almost every printer on this continent, but also the accounts given by gentlemen, of the strictest probity and veracity, from every intelligent quarter.
Virginia Gazette (Pinkney) May 18, 1775
About this entry: Pinkney, a patriotic printer, notes that letters from Boston loyalists have been received that give another point of view of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
