James Franklin

…was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer. His mastery of the printer’s trade, of which he was proud to the end of his life, was achieved between 1718 and 1723. In the same period he read tirelessly and taught himself to write effectively.

Benjamin Franklin’s brother James printed The Rhode Island Almanac in 1728, and Benjamin Franklin (under the nom de plume of Richard Saunders) began his Poor Richard’s almanacs, the most famous of American almanacs, in Philadelphia in 1732. Poor Richard’s, enlivened by Franklin’s shrewd wit and straightforward…

…Gazette (1719) was printed by James Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s brother. Independent newspaper publishing in the English colonies is considered to have begun with James Franklin’s New-England Courant (1721). Freedom of the press was advanced in a landmark case in 1735 when John Peter Zenger, a New York City newspaper publisher,…

…by Benjamin Franklin’s elder brother, James, who soon produced the first independent American newspaper, the New-England Courant of 1721. William Bradford founded the first New York City newspaper, the New-York Gazette, in 1725, and his son Andrew was the first newspaper proprietor in Philadelphia. Further expansion of the colonies created…