Independent reflector biography channel

A New Yorker once declared that “Twitter” had “struck Terror into a whole Hierarchy.” He had no computer, no cellphone, and no online social media following. He was not a presidential candidate, but he would go on to sign the Constitution of the United States.

So who was he? And what did he mean by “Twitter”?

William Livingston was an eighteenth-century lawyer, a colonial intellectual, and a co-founder of the first magazine published in New York.

Independent reflector biography channel youtube

Born in Albany in 1723, he had graduated from Yale University at the age of eighteen and embarked on a legal career in New York City. Simultaneously, he had put himself at the forefront of the provincial literary community by publishing poetry in the 1740s, joining a Manhattan society of learned gentlemen, and planning a colonial magazine modeled on celebrated early-eighteenth-century metropolitan journals such as The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Independent Whig.

The first issue of L