NEW YORK HERALD

American daily newspaper published from 1835 to 1924 in New York City. It was one of the first papers created in the penny-press movement and is often cited as the beginning of American journalism. The Herald was founded by the great editor James Gordon Bennett, and it came to impress its popularizing stamp on the entire American press. Bennett pioneered more aggressive methods of gathering news: he developed the interview as a reporting technique, hired foreign correspondents, and used the telegraph and carrier pigeons to speed the delivery of information. The Herald covered subjects that had not previously been considered newsworthy or had been inadequately reported, such as finance, sports, foreign events, society affairs, and the theatre. Bennett had an unerring instinct for what interested the public, and under his direction the Herald developed a style of reporting that was sensational in emphasis, high-spirited in tone, and often sardonic, cynical, or malicious. The Herald had a larger staff and published more news than any other paper in New York City. His son, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., became managing editor in 1866 and took over as editor the following year. The younger Bennett, although also a gifted editor and promoterit was he who sent Henry M. Stanley to Africa to find the long-lost explorer and missionary David Livingstonedissipated much of the Herald's resources with his lavish living in Paris and London, running the Herald largely in absentia. He founded a Paris edition and otherwise contributed much to the paper's strengths, but when he died in 1918 he had extracted tens of millions of dollars from its earnings for his own comfort, and the paper was losing money when Frank Munsey bought it from the estate. Munsey's intent was to build up the Herald by merging the morning edition of the New York Sun and the New York Tribune into it. He proceeded with the Sun maneuver, but the proprietors of the Tribune, Ogden and Helen Rogers Reid, rejected his offers for years, and finally he sold the Herald to them. In 1924 the Herald thus disappeared into the New York Herald-Tribune, which was a voice of moderate Republicanism and competent journalism for the next four decades. The paper began to decline after Ogden Reid's death in 1947, however, and after a protracted period of financial difficulties, it was shut down in 1966. It was survived by the onetime Paris Herald as the International Herald-Tribune. History Two major groups of Indian tribes were living in the New York region when Europeans first arrived: the Mahican (Mohican) and Munsee tribes of the Algonquian family near the Atlantic coast and, farther inland, the five tribes of the IroquoisMohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Senecawhich formed the Iroquois Confederacy about 1570. This confederacy of Indian tribes, with its advanced social and governmental institutions, reached the height of its power about 1700. The alignment of these tribes with the British against the French and the Algonquian probably enabled the British to emerge as victors in the nearly 150 years of struggle between the two European powers in northern North America. Settlement and colonial period New York was originally settled as a colony of the Netherlands following Henry Hudson's exploration in 1609 of the river later named for him. In 1624 the Dutch established Fort Orange at modern Albany as the first permanent European settlement in New York. One year later New Amsterdam was established at the foot of Manhattan Island. To legalize the settlement, Peter Minuit, the Dutch governor, paid the Indians merchandise worth about 60 Dutch guildersabout $24. Although the Dutch established several settlements along the Hudson, their interest was more in trade than in permanent agricultural development. Thus, while the trading posts prospered and aided the general expansion of the empire of the Netherlands, no deep roots of permanent colonization were planted in New York. The most likely explanation for this lies in the economic prosperity and social stability of the homeland. The Dutch citizens had no strong economic motivations to move overseas, nor were there sufficient religious quarrels at this time to promote any such movement. When an English fleet sailed into New York harbour in 1664, Peter Stuyvesant, the governor, surrendered without a fight. Although controversy ensued for several years, the colony was firmly in English hands by 1669. Under the English it was renamed New York, for the Duke of York. Despite this change in ownership and sovereignty, however, the colony developed slowly. Like the Dutch, the English crown granted large tracts of land to private individuals. This system of landownership was not very attractive to settlers such as the farmer-colonists who had settled the New England area, and agricultural development, particularly in the areas along the Hudson valley, remained slight. The European war between France and England had its counterpart in North America. The French, established along the St. Lawrence and in Quebec, made a number of forays into northern and central New York. The strong Five Nations federation of the Iroquois aligned itself with the English in New York and New England because of aid given earlier by the French to the rival Algonquian. This warfare discouraged settlement beyond Albany. The military situation was brought to a conclusion in 1763 by the Treaty of Paris, which confirmed English dominance of the New York region. A gradual but steady movement of settlers from New England was the beginning of New York's population explosion. The New Englanders moved across the borders of Connecticut and Massachusetts, some remaining on the east bank of the Hudson, others passing through Albany to the interior. In 1698 the colony's population was about 18,000, two-thirds of it concentrated in and around New York City. By the eve of the American Revolution, it had grown to 163,000, with the concentration nearly exactly reversed, but New York still ranked only seventh among the American colonies. Dutch culture remained strong in New York City and in Albany, while most of the settlements in the interior had a flavour and dialect of the New England Yankee; there were also several German communities. This emerging pattern of cultural heterogeneity was later to have a considerable influence on the politics of the state, as were the waves of immigration from Europe that followed the war and continued well into the 20th century.