The Muse, successor to the Memorial Times, began publishing in 1950 in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, as an unnamed paper.
In the early years of publication, it was a campus gossip tabloid; in the late 1960s it developed an activist flair which attracted the attention of the provincial government and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), with the latter including The Muse in their investigations of supposedly Marxist organizations.
In the late eighties, the paper was enlivened by the women's movement, and followed a more activist agenda, including special coverage of gay, lesbian and bisexual issues not discussed in the mainstream media, and a boycotted list of advertisers.
The Muse was a member of Canadian University Press (CUP), a non-profit co-operative and newswire service owned by about 70 student newspapers at post-secondary schools in Canada.
In January 2004, the Muse hosted the Canadian University Press national conference (CUP 66) for the first time in the paper's history.