17

religious, some poetic; proceedings of Congress, the
proposed act to incorporate Baltimore, editorials and
anecdotes.

Although the Sunday Monitor is the first Sunday
newspaper known to have been published in the United
States, there is in its columns a tantalizing para-
graph:

From a correspondent - A fragment. During the
last century, several great men undertook to
furnish a Sunday Olio, and in the most varie-
gated garb dressed up their "terms", but rapid-
ly descending from the sublime into the ridicu-
lous, they with a single dash of the goose-
quill thus - "laughable anecdotes, and enter-
taining stories" - hushed the brat forever.⁴⁹

No copy of this mysterious Olio - and no other refer-
ence to it - has been found; the reference may be to
an English newspaper, or to some extra edition pub-
lished on Sunday, or even a paper with a wholly dif-
ferent title (For the word "olio" meaning "medly" or
"potpourri" was not uncommonly used to designate a
news sheet). At any rate, Philip Edwards must take
the credit for initiating the Sunday paper into
American journalism.

No later issue of the Sunday Monitor is known
and it is generally conceded by newspaper historians
and bibliographers that December 18 was the only

49 Sunday monitor. December 18, 1796,