Scholars have paid relatively little attention to the highbrow, middlebrow, and popular periodicals that African Americans read and discussed regularly during the Jim Crow era -- publications such as the Chicago Defender, the Crisis, Ebony, and the Half-Century Magazine. Jim Crow Networks considers how these magazines and newspapers, and their authors, readers, advertisers, and editors worked as part of larger networks of activists and thinkers to advance racial uplift and resist racism during the first half of the twentieth century. As Eurie Dahn demonstrates, authors like James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, and Jean Toomer wrote in the context of interracial and black periodical networks, which shaped the literature they produced and their concerns about racial violence. This original study also explores the overlooked intersections between the black press and modernist and Harlem Renaissance texts, and highlights key sites where readers and writers worked toward bottom-up sociopolitical changes during a period of legalized segregation.
Countering assumptions about early American print culture and challenging our scholarly fixation on the novel, Jared Gardner reimagines the early American magazine as a rich literary culture that operated as a model for nation-building by celebrating editorship over authorship and serving as a virtual salon in which citizens were invited to share their different perspectives. The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture reexamines early magazines and their reach to show how magazine culture was multivocal and presented a porous distinction between author and reader, as opposed to novel culture, which imposed a one-sided authorial voice and restricted the agency of the reader.
Covering the decades from the 1830s through the end of the century, as well as the eastern, southern, and western regions of the United States, these essays, by a diverse group of scholars, examine a variety of periodicals from the well-known Atlantic Monthly to small papers such as The National Era. They illustrate how literary analysis can be enriched by consideration of social history, publishing contexts, the literary marketplace, and the relationships between authors and editors.
"The five volumes of A History of American Magazines constitute a unique cultural history of America, viewed through the pages and pictures of her periodicals from the publication of the first monthly magazine in 1741 through the golden age of magazines in the twentieth century"--Page 4 of cover.
A gorgeously illustrated tour of several centuries of American magazine history. The history of the American magazine is intricately entwined with the history of the nation itself. In the colonial eighteenth century, magazines were crucial outlets for revolutionary thought, with the first statement of American independence appearing in Thomas Paine's Pennsylvania Magazine in June 1776. In the eighteenth century, magazines were some of the first staging grounds for still-contentious debates on Federalism and states' rights. In the years that followed, the landscape of publications spread in every direction to explore aspects of American life from sports to politics, religion to entertainment, and beyond. Magazines and the American Experience is an expansive and chronological tour of the American magazine from 1733 to the present. Illustrated with more than four hundred color images, the book examines an enormous selection of specialty magazines devoted to a range of interests running from labor to leisure to literature. The contributors--Leonard Banca and Suze Bienaimee, both experts in the field of periodical history--devote particular focus to magazines written for and by Black Americans throughout US history, including David Ruggles's Mirror of History (1838), [Frederick] Douglass' Monthly (1859), the combative Messenger (1917), the Negro Digest (1942), and Essence (1970). With its mix of detailed descriptions, historical context, and lush illustrations, this handsome guide to American magazines should entice casual readers and serious collectors alike.
Similar to the "digital revolution" of the last century, the colonial and early national periods were a time of improved print technologies, exploding information, faster communications, and a fundamental reinventing of publishing and media processes. Between the early 1700s, when periodical publications struggled, and the late 1790s, when print media surged ahead, print culture was radically transformed by a liberal market economy, innovative printing and papermaking techniques, improved distribution processes, and higher literacy rates, meaning that information, particularly in the form of newspapers and magazines, was available more quickly and widely to people than ever before. These changes generated new literary genres and new relationships between authors and their audiences. The study of periodical literature and print culture in the eighteenth century has provided a more intimate view into the lives and tastes of early Americans, as well as enabled researchers to further investigate a plethora of subjects and discourses having to do with the Atlantic world and the formation of an American republic. Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America is a collection of essays that delves into many of these unique magazines and newspapers and their intersections as print media, as well as into what these publications reveal about the cultural, ideological, and literary issues of the period; the resulting research is interdisciplinary, combining the fields of history, literature, and cultural studies. The essays explore many evolving issues in an emerging America: scientific inquiry, race, ethnicity, gender, and religious belief all found voice in various early periodicals. The differences between the pre- and post-Revolutionary periodicals and performativity are discussed, as are vital immigration, class, and settlement issues. Political topics, such as the emergence of democratic institutions and dissent, the formation of early parties, and the development of regional, national, and transnational cultural identities are also covered. Using digital databases and recent poststructural and cultural theories, this book returns us to the periodicals archive and regenerates the ideological and discursive landscape of early American literature in provocative ways; it will be of value to anyone interested in the crosscurrents of early American history, book history, and cultural studies. Mark L. Kamrath is associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida. Sharon M. Harris is Lorraine Sherley Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University.
