The literary independence of Spanish America was inseparable from political independence. In the eighteenth century, colonials began to realise that their economic and political interests were not identical with those of Spain; and writers found that the American environment offered more interesting material than foreign models. If these men still looked to Spanish literature, it was in order to apply its precepts and examples to America. Moreover they now had a public eager for local information and news, a public formed of artisans, tradesmen, professional men who might live and die without seeing Europe and for whom its problems and literature were remote. These were the kind of people who read local newspapers (the first of which were founded in the eighteenth century) in order to find out about people they knew, about the arrival and departure of ships and about government and ecclesiastical appointments. Unimportant gossip? Perhaps. But these first newspapers, which printed matters too trivial to come under the censorship, nevertheless helped to give a sense of identity and common interest to the colonials, and in the years immediately prior to Independence this recording of gossip had given way to a serious didactic and reforming brand of journalism. Meanwhile, from Europe itself came direct encouragement to those who were interested in registering American experience, for throughout the Western world philosophers were increasingly recognising that the data of knowledge came from sense-impressions and that personal observation of phenomena was of greater importance than recourse to the authorities of the past.