to Kentucky. Word of Abraham Lincoln's death reached the back country within days. On Sept. 11, 2001, people watched the attack on the second World Trade Center tower as it happened.
Today, no one feels as if he or she needs to wait until tomorrow for the news, least of all the people who write and edit The Inquirer. In this region, The Inquirer - as a newspaper and as a news-gathering organization - remains the source where people go to find out who has been elected or indicted, what stock is going up or what building burning down, who won, who lost, and how.
The distance of 180 years is best measured not in terms of what was, but what wasn't.
In 1829, Temple University, the Philadelphia Zoo and the Phillies did not yet exist. There was no Academy of Music, no Philadelphia Museum of Art. Eastern State Penitentiary, built for the ages and opened a few months after the newspaper, is today a hulking, haunted tourist attraction.
The Inquirer appeared just after Andrew Jackson was inaugurated as the country's seventh president, and the timing was no coincidence. The paper aimed to support the new president and his vision of democracy, at a time when people were questioning whether having a single, conjoined nation - the United States - was such a hot idea.
The Inquirer started in June and was sold in November - and was better off for it. Increasing rates of literacy, marked advances in printing, and a rising city population - near 80,000 in 1829 - drove the growth of Philadelphia's newspapers. At least seven were battling for readers.
Owner Jesper Harding obtained the first American serial rights for several of Charles Dickens' novels, a grand coup. Later his paper joined others in printing The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. The Inquirer hired Mark Twain - but not to write. Samuel Clemens labored in a back shop as a compositor.
