The Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Brooklyn Eagle

The Brooklyn Eagle's Washington, D.C. bureau office, street view from 1916.
Type	Daily
Format	Tabloid
Owner(s)	Frank D. Schroth
Editor-in-chief	Thomas N. Schroth
Founded	October 26, 1841
Language	English
Ceased publication	January 29, 1955
Headquarters	Brooklyn
Website	(Current publication) (Archived issues maintained by the Brooklyn Public Library)

The Brooklyn Eagle, originally The Brooklyn Eagle, and Kings County Democrat, was a daily newspaper published in the city and later borough of Brooklyn, in New York City, for 114 years from 1841 to 1955. At one point, it was the afternoon paper with the largest daily circulation in the United States. Walt Whitman, the 19th-century poet, was its editor for two years. Other notable editors of the Eagle included Thomas Kinsella, St. Clair McKelway, Cleveland Rogers, Frank D. Schroth, and Charles Montgomery Skinner. The paper, renamed The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Kings County Democrat on June 1, 1846, was again renamed, on May 14, 1849, the name being shortened to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. On September 5, 1938, the name was further shortened, to Brooklyn Eagle. The paper ceased publication in 1955 due to a prolonged strike and was briefly revived from the bankrupt estate between 1960 and 1963, and later, with its former name now in the public domain, in the later 1990s in association with another local newspaper in the borough.

A new version of the Brooklyn Eagle as a revival of the old newspaper's traditions began publishing in 1996. It has no business relation to the original Eagle, although it publishes a daily historical/nostalgia feature called "On This Day in History", made up of much material from the pages of the old original Eagle.

The Brooklyn Public Library maintained an online archive of the original Brooklyn Daily Eagle issues encompassing the years 1841 through 1955, a virtual encyclopedic survey of the history of the city and the later borough of Brooklyn for more than a century. The archive was purchased by Ancestry.com for their newspapers.com website.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle was first published on October 26, 1841. Its address at this time, and for many years afterwards, was at 28 Old Fulton Street, Brooklyn (today the site of a landmark building known as the "Eagle Warehouse"). From 1846 to 1848, the newspaper's editor was the poet Walt Whitman.

During the American Civil War, the Eagle supported the Democratic Party; as such, its mailing privileges through the United States Post Office Department were once revoked due to a forged letter supposedly sent by the 16th President Abraham Lincoln. The Eagle played an important role in shaping Brooklyn's civic identity, even after the once-independent city which had become the third-largest city in America at that time, across the East River and New York Bay from old New York on the island of Manhattan to become a borough as part of the annexation and merger campaign and process in the late 1890s which resulted in the formation of the City of Greater New York in 1898, which the newspaper had editorially tried to forestall and stop.