1700s Transatlantic Communication .....

[echokilo]

...... can anyone tell me which kind of detail of news and current affairs etc may have reached England from the America during the early to mid 1700s?

[dot.hawkes]

to be quite honest this would be a case of looking in your county record office, or the one that covers the original home of your anxcestors. I have found an example of this sort of archive material, but it would be up to you to search the CRO catalogue (probably doable online) for the CRO you think would be holding such material.
http://www.thelovens.co.uk/hyrne/

[dot.hawkes]

sorry I think my reply does not explain properly why you are likely to find such letters in a CRO, i've been mulling it over whilst a cooked breakfast and decided I need to elaborate.
The first point is that anyone able to actually write a letter in the 1700s would have had to have been educated and therefore of some social standing.
Secondly, this probably meant that they were from a gentry family at least, and gentry families traditionally kept all correspondence over time in their estate office.
During the last 50 years, the facilities offered by the County Record Offices have meant that family and estate papers could be deposited on loan for safe keeping, or donated and the donation anotated in the CRO catalogue.
This means that original letters are accessible by everyone (with a readers ticket) at all times, and so the conservators are looking after these irreplacable documents at the county expemse.

[dot.hawkes]

furthermore, any secondary source that has drawn on the original (primary source) material, such as a series of correspondence, would be in the form of academic study or published work , which would also likely be amongst the miscellaneaous category in a CRO.