The Post-Crescent
newspaper in Appleton, Wisconsin

The Post-Crescent is a daily newspaper based in Appleton, Wisconsin. Part of the USA Today Co. chain of newspapers, it is primarily distributed in counties surrounding the Appleton/Fox Cities area.
History
The Appleton Crescent was formed in 1853 as a weekly newspaper, the same year that Appleton became a village. The Crescent was a determinedly Democratic newspaper, created by Samuel, James and John Ryan.
Edna Ferber, later a famed writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, became a reporter at the Appleton Crescent at the age of 17 and worked there for about 18 months, approximately 1902–1903.
The Crescent's Jacksonian Democratic politics upset Republicans, and a second newspaper, The Appleton Motor, was formed by F.C. Meade on August 18, 1859. Meade was soon joined by Ryan's brother Francis.
While the two newspapers were bitter rivals, they did cooperate at times. When the Crescent suffered serious damage in 1863 from apparent arson, the Motor ran an article condemning the act.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Post-Crescent” as newspaper in Appleton, Wisconsin. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as newspaper in Appleton, Wisconsin. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7757849. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1853, 1902, 1903 and 1859.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Post-Crescent” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.