The Bowdoin Orient - History

History

The Bowdoin Orient was established in 1871 as Bowdoin College's newspaper and literary magazine. Originally issued bi-weekly, it has been a weekly since April 1899. It is considered to be the oldest continuously-published college weekly in the U.S., which means that it has been in publication every academic year that Bowdoin has been in session since it began publishing weekly. (Other college weeklies stopped printing during certain war years.)

In the beginning, the Orient was laid out in a smaller magazine format and included literary material such as poems and fiction alongside its news. In 1897, the literary society formed its own publication, The Quill, and the Orient has since primarily focused on reporting news. In 1921, the Orient abandoned the magazine format and moved to a larger broadsheet layout to keep up with the trend of the times. Since then, it has variously moved between broadsheet and tabloid sizes and has seen major format updates every decade or two.

In 1912, The Bowdoin Publishing Company was established as the formal publisher of the Orient, and remained independent of the College for many years, while using college facilities and working with faculty-member advisers. The Bowdoin Publishing Company was a legal, non-profit corporation in the State of Maine for many years, at least from 1968 to 1989, though it was most likely an independent corporation since its inception. In 2002, the college forced the Orient to close the Bowdoin Publishing Company's off-campus checking account, which represented the final step in the company's dissolution.

The Orient building has its own archives, with issues dating back to 1873, but it is missing several periods of time. The Hawthorne-Longfellow Library at Bowdoin College has a nearly complete archive of past Orient issues, both in print and on microform. Virtually all print issues are available from 1871 to the present in the library's George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives. Bound copies from 1871 to 1921 can be found in the periodicals section of the library. The Orient is available on microfilm for issues from 1921 to the present.