When Britain began colonizing the New World, strict censorship was the iron rule and any words that disparaged the government were a punishable crime. So when a small newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal, printed scathing articles assailing the new British governor, William Cosby, as corrupt and abusive, it was the paper’s publisher, John Peter Zenger, who took the fall. Although Zenger was merely a front man for Cosby’s true adversaries, he was jailed for the better part of a year and faced a jury in a proceeding matched in importance during the colonial period only by the Salem Witch Trials.