early conditions. Ships arrived from the Sandwich Islands and the States with mail and merchandise at six month intervals. Daily telegraphic communication established by the Oregonian in 1864 with San Francisco was a great feat. Suppression of six papers, during the Civil War for disloyalty to the government, is in itself evidence of an interesting condition and of editors who were fearless of consequences. The influence of Asahel Bush of the Oregon Statesman can still be felt today. He dominated the strong Democratic party for a decade, making and unmaking politicians at will. Later the Oregonian and its editors held sway with possibly less political, but greater material results, by the sponsoring of new industries.
The other part of the dual role of newspapers concerns historians to an apparently increasing degree. The methodology of historical research has not long countenanced the use of newspapers. Lucy Salmon, in the introduction to her valuable study of The Newspaper and the Historian, traces the growth of the use of papers in this connection. She says, "During the forty years that have elapsed since the appearance of the first volume of McMaster's History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, the newspaper has become a familiar source, although its legitimacy as such does not even yet pass unquestioned. The historian has found much to commend in the use of periodical and even ephemeral literature in his study of the past, but during this period he has attached an ever-increasing importance to the reliability of the material he uses He recognizes the manifest usefulness that the newspaper might have, yet he hesitates to accept a form of material the authoritativeness of which has not been thoroughly established."[1]
The need for weighing carefully newspaper evidence
- ↑ Salmon, Lucy. The Newspaper and the Historian, 1923, p. xxxviii.
