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The newspaper came late to Long Island.Ninety-nine years, seven months and two weeks after America's first newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was published in Boston, Frothingham's Long-Island Herald was issued from a small house on Main Street in Sag Harbor on May 10, 1791.

About This Site

The selection of newspaper articles reproduced in this section were obtained primarily from microfilm. We have tried wherever possible to reproduce these stories as they first appeared, even though flaws in the microfilm show up. Where legibility became a problem, Newsday typeset the text again, and it is shown in hypertext markup language.

Dear Editor ...

Ever since that day in 1940 when William D. Grote of Mineola wrote to say he was supporting Wendell Willke for president over Franklin D. Roosevelt -- the first letter to the editor published by Newsday -- the paper has received on the order of half a million pieces of correspondence from readers commenting, in varying tones of indignation, on everything from foreign wars to barking dogs to Why can't the trains run on time? Long called "The County Irritant," the Newsday letters column has been the place readers have come to vent, to berate, to tweak, to opine. From the struggle of returning G.I.s to road rage on the LIE, here's a sampling of some of the things that have been irritating Long Islanders the past six decades.