Chapter 1 of 8

CHAPTER ONEWhat we counted, and what we could not

This archive holds 3,517 clippings from 726 American newspapers, printed between 1724 and 6 October 2023. It is not a sample of the American press. It was assembled by one researcher looking for particular things, and in places looking for the very patterns tested below. Everything that follows has to be read with that in front of it.

Article text survives for 1,770 records, close to half. 1,245 of them say on their own page where that text came from, and whether anyone has checked it against the photograph. The other 525 do not, which is a gap in this archive rather than a judgment about those clippings. Nearly everything below is therefore counted at headline level, because all 3,517 headlines were read off the scan by hand.

This research is still being worked through. Every count drawn from the archive is recomputed from the records each time the page is built, and every figure from outside it is printed with the query that produced it. Where a finding has changed, the correction is printed beside it rather than quietly swapped in. More of it is still being checked, and some of it will move.