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RetroSeasons
RetroSeasons recaps past sports seasons through stories, photos, videos, and stats from every team, league, and stadium in history. Coverage includes the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL, as well as vintage media from defunct teams and leagues.
Spirit of the Times
1831 - 1859
An American weekly newspaper published in New York City. The paper aimed for an upper-class readership made up largely of sportsmen. The Spirit also included humorous material, much of it based on experience of settlers near the southwestern frontier. The Spirit had an average circulation of about 22,000.
The Spirit was founded in 1831 by William T. Porter who edited it for 25 years. The Spirit of the Times was the premier American sporting journal of the 19th century. The paper aimed for an upper-class readership made up largely of sportsmen. By the 1850s, the Spirit covered angling, baseball, cricket, foot racing, fox hunting, horse racing, rowing, yachting, and boxing. The paper printed all sorts of statistics, presaging the American sports obsession with such trivia.
In October of 1856, it was announced "due to some peculiar circumstances", that Porter would surrender ownership to John Richards, and branch off to start a new publication with George Wilkes, called "Porter's Spirit of the Times". When Porter died in 1858, his share in the second Spirit fell into the hands of a New York lawyer.
Wilkes didn't get along with his new partner, so in September 1859 he established his own journal, Wilkes' Spirit of the Times. For a short time there were three Spirits being published simultaneously, but Porter's Spirit went out of business soon after. The original Spirit had a large portion of its subscribers in the South, so the Civil War sealed its fate, leaving Wilkes as the sole survivor after June 1861.
By 1861, the Spirit began covering football more extensively than any previous publication. Football coverage in the Spirit quickly outstripped the same in the paper's main rivals, the New York Clipper and the National Police Gazette. The paper covered college games first; in 1882, football got its own section. This coverage expanded again in 1892.