First Liberian (NOT Librarian!) Newspaper

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Here’s a lovely gem which was recently found misfiled in a group of Civil War letters.

This is vol. 1 no. 1 of the first newspaper published in the colony of Liberia. From 1830 to 1834, its editor was John Brown Russwurm, a Jamaican-born mulatto who was educated in Canada, graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, and then settled in New York where, in 1827, he and Samuel Cornish co-founded Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper in the United States. The Liberian Herald became the fifth oldest newspaper in Africa after the French-language periodicals published in Egypt during the Napoleonic occupation of 1797, the Cape Town Gazette of South Africa, 1880, The Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser, 1801, and The Royal Gold Coast Gazette, 1822.

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