The American colonists were an educated people; though, as most of us do, they tended to favor publications that spoke to their political views and interests. A wide variety of papers and periodicals launched to fill their needs: books of course, but also newspapers from within and without the States and collections of essays published irregularly and infrequently. Magazines as we know them today did not exist in the colonies; what were called “magazines” were mainly eclectic reprints of stories and essays published weeks or months before, abroad. It took Benjamin Franklin to bring one of the first real magazines to America.

On this day, February 16, 1741, Benjamin Franklin published his first original-content magazine, The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle for all the British Plantations in America. As the title implied, the focus of his publication was to be more American and less British.

Franklin was likely spurred to action by an earlier launch of a Philadelphia magazine entitled The American Magazine or Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies. The publisher of that magazine was Andrew Bradford, a one-time collaborator with Franklin on an earlier publication, the American Weekly Mercury. Some years before, a Franklin-penned column in the Mercury offended the governor of the state, and the owner of the publication, Bradford, was briefly jailed as a result.