Two-hundred years ago, news of a national or regional emergency moved only as fast as someone could carry the message. So when the British entered the Bay and we found ourselves on the frontline of the War of 1812, those urgent dispatches containing critical information came by word of mouth or in letters and newspapers carried by the U.S. Mail. But regardless of the method of conveyance reports moved only as fast as a horseback rider, the stage coach, or a boat could speed along on the journey.
On Saturday, March 23, for Capital Gazette and the Annapolis Heritage Commission, I am going to examine how news and information spread when the war came to Maryland’s shores. We will use dramatic published accounts and the personal correspondence of firsthand observers to consider how Marylanders were kept informed about critical matters during those alarming times. We will focus in on how those urgent dispatches moved along over a hundred years before broadcasting changed things. For that matter, the nearly instant conveyance of flashes through the electronic transmission of dots and dashes of the telegraph was still a generation away.
In the end, we will contrast that spread of new and information during that national emergency 200 years ago with today’s digital age, when fast and massive broadcast coverage and the instantaneous chatter of social media provides an overwhelming stream of news as we consider how that shapes our reaction to the emergency.