This project studies the first Black-owned and Black-published US-American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal (1827–29), exploring how the newspaper offered a unique tool of communication and intellectual stimulation that produced radical cultural meanings—especially for early Black Americans whose opportunities for widespread intellectual cultivation, community growth, and cultural expression were limited.

The research focuses particularly on the relationship between Freedom’s Journal’s physical and technological characteristics like its page layout, masthead, and printed visuals, on the one hand, and the newspaper’s textual content on the other hand. This relationship is called the “content-medium relationship,” and to better understand how it may have intentionally or unintentionally created for readers different important meanings and effects—from new understandings of Black people’s role in science, the arts, and history to considerations of different political routes toward racial equality and justice—the project is broken into sections that investigate different but related aspects of the content-medium relationship in Freedom’s Journal.

Some of the key questions that the project addresses include: What methods did this Black-owned and Black-operated newspaper in the 1820s United States use to produce substantial challenges to the status quo without jeopardizing the safety of its editors, printers, contributors, and readers? What made the newspaper an especially effective tool for Black cultures in the United States (and abroad)? What made it different than other forms of printed media like the book? To answer these questions, the project examines a wide variety of underappreciated textual genres published Freedom’s Journal, including advertisements, short stories, poems, letters, news reports, travel accounts, articles, opinions, extracts, and reviews of literature and theater.

The project is the first of its kind to bring the mostly European field of Intermediality Studies together with investigations into nineteenth-century Black US-American newspapers and culture. The research will take place at the Department of American Studies at the University of Graz, which is also home to the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz.