why 1908? why the New-York Tribune?

A quick explanation. I wanted a Presidential election year. I didn’t want to do McKinley, didn’t want to do a re-election, and couldn’t do 1912 – which would be really interesting – because the collection I’m using doesn’t cover that year. So it was 1908. It’s convenient that it’s exactly a century ago, but that wasn’t a goal.

I thought it would be cool to do a small local paper people don’t see much of, but there was only one choice from an area I know very little about. (The rest of the choices being from areas I know nothing about.) Unfortunately, the Amador Ledger is only a weekly, and not very appealing visually. I thought of doing the San Francisco Call – the only Bay Area paper with a daily selection, and the region of the country with whose history I’m most familiar – but then I figured a New York paper would have more self-consciously “national” news. So I went with the Tribune.