Fit to Print: New Brunswick's Papers: 150 Years of the Comic, the Sad, the Odd and the Forgotten Paperback - 1987

From the rear cover

History with a difference! Fit to Print is history written by people who were actually there, who learned at first hand of the scandals and barbaric cruelties and incidents of mirt hand misery. Often the story is told by witnesses, or by victims of the great fires, near famines, and outbreaks of disease which ravaged the daily lives of our forefathers.

Fit to Print peeks behind the curtains of past events, giving quick glimpses of the real lives of real people. It gathers information that seems to find no place in conventional histories. There are the odd and eccentric items. No other history tells us that in 1812 Elizabeth (Beard) Hopkins had six sons in the famous 104th Regiment, or that in 1848 it was illegal to beat a carpet or a mat in Fredericton, except a doormat, and only before 8 a.m., or that in 1871 a Calais baseball team defeated St. Stephen 80 to 63 (which no one found remarkable), or that in 1910 Auguste Belliveau of Moncton set a record when he was arrested for bootlegging thirteen times in one day.

But there are also many entries which warn us against believing in "the good old days" of the past. Racism, sexism, religious bigotry flourished. There were black slaves in New Brunswick; many women lived harsh and vulnerable lives; battles between Catholics and Protestants brought death and maimings. The Ku Klux Klan was active in the province. Justice was often rough and punishments savage, with very young children sent to prison. And corruption thrived in politics. This book offers only a sampler of the rich social history of New Brunswick. But it avoids the endless debates about Confederation, railways and tariffs, and presents instead in its rich variety the daily matters that our ancestors found interesting and that their publications found Fit to Print.