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This chapter examines the material and cultural foundations that provided the resources necessary for magazine publishing and the demand necessary to sustain a large number of magazines in locations across America. In particular, it explores a number of fundamental changes in American society that supported the explosive growth and increasing variety of magazines. It first considers basic material supports such as advances in printing and papermaking technologies and the development of the U.S. postal system before discussing the more complex demographic, economic, and cultural supports. These include population growth and urbanization and the rise of various religious, political, and economic communities of readers. In particular, the chapter describes the growth of an increasingly urban, better-educated, more prosperous population, along with the development of copyright law in Britain and America and its impact on cultural conceptions of authorship in both countries.

This chapter looks at the history of American magazines during the period 1741–1860. It first traces the origins of magazines in Europe, where magazine publishing began in the late seventeenth century as printing presses became widespread. Among the early English-language magazines in this period were the Philosophical Transactions, A Review of the Affairs of France and of all Europe, and Gentleman's Magazine. The chapter proceeds by discussing the growth of the magazine industry in America from 1741 to 1860 as well as the evolving nature of magazine distribution in terms of audience, content, format, and genre variety, as well as publishing and readership geography. The chapter highlights the sharp distinction between the short-lived, small-circulation magazines of the mid-eighteenth century and the often long-lived, mass-circulation periodicals of the mid-nineteenth century.

This chapter examines the evolution of magazines in America from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, with particular emphasis on who launched them and and why they did so. It also considers how magazines' internal operations evolved to take advantage of increasingly beneficent material and cultural resources such as population growth, urbanization, and improved printing technologies. To find out who founded magazines, the chapter focuses on entrepreneurs' social positions—their status, meaning their relative positions in a social hierarchy—which afford them access to the resources they needed to start new ventures. It then compares later magazine founders with their predecessors and investigates how founders' motivations changed over time. It also describes what founders said they hoped to accomplish with their magazine publishing ventures and concludes by analyzing the strategies they used to gain legitimacy and support from subscribers.

This chapter examines the relationship between magazines and social reform movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular, it looks at the “benevolent empire,” an interorganizational field that consisted of a large number of voluntary social reform associations, the religious structures that supported them, and the magazines that both supported organized reform efforts and were supported by them. The chapter first reviews the history of reform movements, with emphasis on the links among successive movements and the formal organizations that supported them. It then considers the religious roots of social reform and the specialized magazines launched by reform leaders to broadcast their views and show. It also discusses how often the many different social reform movements were covered across all magazine genres before concluding with an analysis of the antislavery movement and its interaction with both religion and magazines.

This concluding chapter summarizes that the book has documented the evolution of American magazines from a few, fragile, questionable undertakings to more than a thousand robust, highly legitimate elements of print culture. Between 1741 and 1860, magazines underwent a profound transformation that were made possible by a series of changes in American society, including population growth and urbanization, advances in publishing technologies, the gradual development of copyright law, the modernization of social reform movements, and the rise of protoscientific agriculture. The chapter discusses the implications of the book's findings for understanding modernity and community, for other aspects of American society such as the establishment of various medical schools, and for those who study media in the contemporary era. It concludes by reiterating the important role played by magazines in fostering the pluralistic integration that distinguished American society from European ones in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This introductory chapter begins with an overview of the present volume, which is structured around three parts. Part I considers a range of familiar and less well-known magazines from the 1890s through to the 1930s, and maps out the overall terrain in which modernism took hold in American magazines and the shape of the publications involved in this process. Part II focuses on the literary geography of the modernist magazine in America, with chapters covering multiple spatial locations: the metropolitan magazine, the regional magazine, the magazine in Canada, and the transnational exchange between magazines in North America and Europe. Part III considers the many magazines that engaged in radical social, cultural, and political debate, focusing mainly on the decades from the 1930s onwards. The chapter then discusses the geographical dispersal of magazine publication; the contents of Munson's fabled magazine rack; and the massive growth in American magazines and their circulations at the end of the nineteenth century.

While some Jewish Americans have criticized ritual circumcision in magazine articles and proposed substituting a rite without genital cutting, others have defended it passionately, insisting that it is an essential component of Jewish tradition and identity. Jewish feminists seem unable to develop a forthright critique of the obvious male-centered nature of ritual circumcision; this is even reflected in children’s books portraying circumcisions. Jewish-American fiction, by such authors as Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud, again reveals underlying perplexity with the role of circumcision in contemporary Jewish identity. Television sitcoms repeat the theme of Jewish discomfort when portraying infant circumcision, while programs dealing with adult circumcision are characterized by outright denigration of the foreskin.

This chapter recounts the struggles of publishers, printers, editors, and contributors to American magazines of the national period. It shows how the magazine occupies a liminal place at best in the history of print in the early republic. The book and the newspaper dominate far more space in the story of the print's rise, and rightly so, as the magazine seems dominated by random posturing, by armchair moralists with neoclassical pseudonyms offering their opinion on everything from fashion to dueling. It is no wonder that modern readers have favored two forms—novel and newspaper—whose genealogies are more immediately traceable into the twentieth century.

This chapter focuses on Pauline E. Hopkins's “Of One Blood” in the context of the African American periodical in which it was serialized, the Colored American Magazine. Published only a few years after the surprising Italian defeat at Adwa, “Of One Blood” contributed to the magazine's project of “documentary Ethiopianism” as expressed in histories and biographies but it also preserved the fantastic conception of Ethiopia that helped create Ethiopianism. “Of One Blood” is exemplary as a fictional text that introduces the mysticism that the historical and ethnographic texts of the Colored American Magazine avoid while still participating in documentary Ethiopianism by sending its characters to Ethiopia. The chapter also discusses how “Of One Blood” activates Regalization Fantasy, which is intrinsic to imperial Ethiopianist ideology. As a result of the fantasy's paradoxical inclusivity and exclusivity, the imperial model of Ethiopianism seen in “Of One Blood” contains the irritant that leads to its own dismantling by mid-century.

This chapter explores the forms, fantasies, and energies that gathered around the American magazine in the eighteenth century. Traditionally, the early American magazine has been seen as a kind of “overture” to the “Golden Age” of the American magazine to follow. Yet, the chapter considers this early “primitive” magazine in terms of the ambitions and energies with which it was invested, revealing its unique aspects and aspirations to periodical culture before the 1820s that mark it as discrete from the magazine to follow, in ways not dissimilar to the relationship between silent cinema and the sound cinema that emerges after 1927. Understood in its own terms and in relationship to a broader transatlantic circulation of energies and texts, the early American magazine can be seen to represent something very different from the magazine that was to follow.

This chapter discusses the histories of Smart Set and American Parade, New York-based magazines that positioned themselves as ‘modern’ via their attention to contemporary trends, including the changing roles of women, the rise of American youth culture, and radical urbanization. At a time when an increasing number of educated Americans were seeking guidance on what authors were worth reading in a shifting cultural terrain, The Smart Set and American Parade adopted a self-consciously cosmopolitan approach that included editorials and reviews that encouraged readers to look beyond national boundaries and the nineteenth-century literary dominance of Great Britain towards awareness of experiments in Irish, Latin American, and Continental literatures. In their pages, young American writers reached a sizeable, educated readership by reflecting the realities of a radically transformed American landscape — of skyscrapers, birth control, jazz, and Prohibition — while experimenting in style, theme, and approach in new, uniquely American, ways.

This chapter focuses on three magazines — The Measure, Rhythmus, and Palms — whose work extends from 1921 to 1930 and which have hitherto not received the attention of other magazines concerned with publishing verse, such as Poetry or Others. It considers the blend of ‘tradition and innovation’ that marks American poetry in the periodicals of this period, and helps delineate the main trends in the exploration of the new values marking American identity in the 1920s.

This chapter presents a comprehensive search for the quintessential Beat magazine. The core Beats — Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky — rarely undertook any editing, other than of their own work. However, despite their failure to engage centrally with the field of ‘little magazine’ editing and publishing, the Beats' role in the history of ‘little magazine’ culture after the Second World War should not be underestimated. Their influence on the composite textualities of ‘little magazine’ writing was actually seminal, even if only Yugen ended up looking anything like an American Beat ‘little magazine’.

This chapter recovers the lost histories of three novel writers of the early national period who have made significant contributions of their own to periodical culture. It first charts Susanna Rowson's writing career and her similarities with that of Brown, given that the both of them are among the leading novelists of the early national period. The chapter next looks at Brown's magazine contributions, before turning to Washington Irving's magazine participation under the pseudonym, “Jonathan Oldstyle”—a nod to Dennie's “Oliver Oldschool.” At the same time the chapter also discusses other facets and challenges which shaped the early American magazine, from the implications which may be drawn from their publication histories (and more often than not their unprofitable runs) to their critiques toward the novel format.

This chapter examines four magazines — Vanity Fair, American Mercury,New Yorker, and Esquire — that engaged with modernism in varying ways. Vanity Fair showcased modernist art and literature and was prepared to print challenging poetry and controversial paintings, but these images and texts appeared alongside celebrity portraits and cartoons. Esquire published many stories and essays by leading modernist authors, but eschewed radically experimental work and presented a distinctly gendered version of modernism. The American Mercury concentrated on American writing and was a particularly important outlet for Harlem Renaissance authors, while the New Yorker discussed, reviewed, and parodied modernists rather than publishing their work.

This chapter discusses the histories of The Midland in Iowa City and Prairie Schooner in Lincoln, Nebraska, two of the most successful periodicals to follow an expressly regional agenda throughout the 1920s. The main dilemma faced by Midwestern magazines was how to remain true to both artistic standards and to the overarching goal of serving the region. How can one write about the Midwestern farmland and still live in the avant-garde? In short, the Midwestern little magazine had to be both modern and anti-modern, standing against urbane modernity while simultaneously embracing those standards. The editorial staff of both The Midland and the Prairie Schooner took different approaches to solving this dilemma, but both were essentially in conflict about how to write a regional literature in a modern setting.

This chapter examines six ‘little magazines’ of the American West and locates them within larger conversations about the place the American West, particularly the Southwest, occupies within America's dominant national mythology and within modernism's own geographical imagination. It asks, how did these magazines engage the West's real and imagined geographies? How did such engagement shape their literary modernism? And how did individual contributors help to create and critique what Michael Riley has called the ‘hyper-romanticized mindset’ that has been historically projected onto the region and its peoples? The chapter first examines the magazines collectively, situating them within a broader context of modernist ‘little magazines’ and within efforts to define the West as a site of modernist production. It then outlines each magazine's contents and contributors, its evolving editorial practices, and frequently devolving economic solvency.

This chapter discusses the history of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, one of the best known of ‘little magazines’ of literary modernism, perhaps the one that encapsulates the centrality of small magazines in modernism's formation and dissemination. Founded in Chicago in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, and acquiring for its first six years the dynamic if combustible services of Ezra Pound as foreign correspondent, it devoted itself to promoting what Monroe described as the ‘new poetry’. During its early years it published a range of young, experimental, and often soon to be well-known poets from both sides of the Atlantic, including all the major modernist poets, frequently playing an invaluable role in their emergence and success as writers.