Abstract
Periodical studies, a subset of the larger fields of book history and cultural studies, has grown exponentially in the last two decades. During this time, scholars have learned to examine periodicals as objects of literary and historical value that not only illuminate important cultural tensions but raise questions pertaining to the material production of the text. Interest in American periodicals (including magazines, newspapers, and varied print ephemera) has generated a multitude of articles and books on the subject, as well as robust participation in the Research Society of American Periodicals, which publishes the biannual journal American Periodicals. In addition, digitization projects have made periodical archives widely accessible, helping further transform the way scholars approach the study of periodicals.
Building on groundbreaking books by Matthew Schneirov, Ellen Garvey Gruber, Richard Ohmann, Robert Scholes, and others, recent publications continue to expand the range and breadth of periodical studies, informing a wide variety of related disciplinary fields including media studies, art history, urban studies, and literary studies. 1 Advancing important concepts and concerns relating to the materiality of the printed page, the formation of reading communities, and circulation networks are books relating to the African American experience, feminism, modernism studies, nineteenth-century literary studies, and science fiction. 2 Adding to this rich repository of work on periodicals and newspapers within specific cultural, social, and historic contexts are three books which are exceptionally well-researched, innovative, and compelling.
An Empire of Print by Steven Carl Smith makes a provocative claim. Providing five case studies of select printers, booksellers, and publishers, Smith argues that modern printing practices existed in New York long before the famed rise of Printing House Square in the 1830s. Driven by both economic and patriotic ambitions and utilizing marketing strategies and trade networks that stretched across state lines, New York–based print pioneers of the early republic were the first to create a reading public of distinctively American work and, concomitantly, an imagined nation-state. Serving as a corrective to landmark books on the period (most notably Trish Loughran’s The Republic in Print), Smith draws from business records and related archival material to show that printers of this period were eminently successful in their deliberate attempts to combine the economics of printing with the ethos of nation-building. 3
Another significant contribution of Smith’s book is his emphasis on the agency—and unbridled energy—of the printers themselves. Much recent work on periodical studies credits printer–editor–author networks, technological advances, and emerging institutional cultures for publishing success. Smith addresses these considerations, but at the center of each of his case studies are fully realized human agents. His opening chapter, for example, focuses on the print entrepreneur Samuel Loudon. An emigrant from Scotland, Loudon began his commercial life as the owner of a small dry goods store in the 1750s catering to the growing tastes of colonial consumers. One of those evolving tastes included literature, so in 1771 Loudon opened a bookstore, and subsequently New York City’s second circulating library (a cheaper competitor to the New York Society Library) that catered especially to female readers, referred to, by Loudon, as “his best customers” (p. 15). In 1776, Loudon founded the New-York Packet, and American Advertiser, a newspaper which, as Smith writes, was to be “a living record of the extraordinary events then unfolding in New York and elsewhere in the British North American colonies” (p. 15). Significantly, Loudon’s publishing endeavor sought to reach out beyond his local market, aspiring to create a distribution network that reached the mid-Atlantic region, New England, and upstate New York.
In August 1776, however, the arrival of British troops in Manhattan forced Loudon to literally print his paper “on the run” before he finally settled in Fishkill for the remainder of the war. Smith’s account of Loudon, who during this time encountered paper shortages, equipment failure, and an on-going lack of payment, attests to the printer’s fortitude and determination to serve the Revolutionary cause. After the war, this mutual interest of economics and patriotism made Loudon a vital part of a print revival in New York. Based in Hanover Square—the Printing House Square of its day—Loudon competed with eleven other printers including Thomas Greenleaf and Francis Childs, all of whom whetted their customers’ reading inclinations and created an understanding of themselves as citizens of a new nation.
Examining his account books, Smith finds that Loudon was a pioneer in negotiating advertising space and rates in his newspapers, helping to connect varied merchants to a growing customer base. The account books also show the harried pace the printer kept to keep afloat as he printed annual laws and proceedings of the state. To satisfy his political subscribers, for example, he quickly printed and delivered the laws just after they came off his press. As Smith shows, Loudon was both an innovative businessman and a political intermediary, whose work to distribute the state’s laws helps to build the Empire state “from the ground up” (p. 43).
In another case study, Smith examines the complicated publication history and far-ranging distribution of William Gordon’s History of the Rise Progress, and Establishment of the Independence of the United States. Written in America, the first edition was actually published in London in 1788 and aimed at a British audience. The second edition was pirated a year later by the New York publishers, Hodge, Allen, and Campbell, for a nationwide audience. Rather than sell the works in bookshops, the publishers used a subscription system that involved a wide network of printers, booksellers, and literary agents. Advertisement for the American edition of the book was carried in newspapers across the colonies. Ultimately, the book was sold to 1,124 subscribers, almost equally divided across the Mid-Atlantic, New England, and Southern states. In discussing the marketing of Gordon’s work, Smith makes a novel point about how subscription bookselling during this era gave birth to a national reading public. As he explains, “subscribing to William Gordon’s History created a national imaginary that gradually became a material actuality, as each copy of the text was either bundled or bound and then shipped to the man or woman who bought it” (p. 55). Equally important for this national reading public was what was essentially a third edition of the text, when New York newspaper publishers Thomas Morton and Francis Childs serialized chapters of the work in their newspapers. For a fraction of the book subscription price, readers could read the history serially in either Morton’s New-York Morning Post or Child’s Daily Advertiser, a cross-class process feeding the nation’s hunger for a heroic past.
Many historians have documented the contentious period of the New Republic, when newspaper editors went at each other with notorious venom. In discussing John Ward Fenno, Smith examines the oppositional politics of the Federalists and Republicans from a print culture perspective, peering into account books and the bookshops themselves. While Fenno is best known for his editing of the Federalist Gazette of the United States, first in New York and then in Philadelphia, less well known is that in 1800 Fenno returned to New York to open a bookstore in Hanover Square. Smith’s research reveals that Fenno’s bookstore inventory consisted of more than 10,000 printed items, aimed exclusively at Federalist readers. Also noteworthy is Smith’s attention to geography and spatial movement. Readers learn, for example, that Fenno quickly relocated his bookstore uptown to 141 Broadway. The move was significant, for not only was the shop now near the elegant, newly built City Hotel but directly across from Hoquet Caritat’s bookstore, catering to radical Republicans. This geographic information clarifies political divisions, as Smith pictures Federalists flipping “through copies of the Anti-Jacobin Review,” while just across the street Jeffersonian Radicals were “poring over French Enlightenment philosophy” (p. 107).
Perhaps no greater publisher can be given credit to the rise of New York print culture and cultivation generally than Evert Duyckinck (1760-1833). Better known is his son Evert Augustus Duyckinck (1816-1878), editor of the Literary World and other literary enterprises, as well as friend and booster of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other Young America authors. But Smith’s focus on the father is both revelatory and apt. With a career as a bookseller and publisher lasting from 1793, Duyckinck, Sr. was America’s first true print entrepreneur. Smith examines the extensive business accounts (600 pages of “meticulously recorded transactions”) across these years to trace the growth of Duyckinck’s small Pearl Street bookshop “into a national clearing house of best-selling educational and literary texts.” Smith includes lists of subscribers divided by occupational category to reveal how book buyers included artisans such as “bakers, carpenters, hairdressers, sailors, blacksmiths, butchers” as well as merchants and other professionals. He shows too the wide reach of Duyckinck’s book business, an extensive print and reprint network of hundreds of thousands of books reaching readers in almost every state. Equally revealing is Smith’s analysis of the types of books printed, showing that Duyckinck was “a leading figure in a campaign to educate the nation’s growing population” (p. 144). We learn, for example, that of the publisher’s known production of 872,000 total books, a quarter were schoolbooks by the likes of Caleb Bingham, Noah Webster, Lindley Murray, and others. As with his other case studies, Smith convincingly shows that “not only did a national print market exist in the Early Republic—it flourished” (p. 174).
Another groundbreaking work is Julia Guarneri’s Newsprint Metropolis. Covering the period from 1880 to 1930, Guarneri studies print media not merely from a material and production standpoint but as an active agent in the “making” of cities and their inhabitants. To show this, she examines newspapers in four different cities, examines a wide array of print artifacts, and considers a broad range of reading publics. Modern newspapers, she posits as her central tenet, served as “maps that could help [readers] navigate the modern city and the modern world” (p. 7).
Her opening chapter serves as an overview of how newspapers evolved into the modern version with which we are familiar today. Cheap paper, advances in printing technologies, and growing income from advertisements allowed newspapers to expand in size well beyond the four- to eight-page papers of the previous era. Relying on large teams of reporters for the latest news, gossip, and scandals, utilizing giant headlines and varied publicity stunts, and inventing a variety of new features, newspapers became required reading by men, women, and even children across classes. While the front pages were aimed at men, inside were topics aimed to attract women, including coverage of the arts and detailed descriptions of weddings, charity balls, and other society happenings. Working men and immigrants were drawn in by simplified language and illustrations, whereas the new comics sections appealed to all, including children. The afternoon edition was also added to extend an audience beyond men, for these were often brought home for daughters and wives to also read. Helping to create a truly mass audience were editions of the Sunday paper, some of which reached more than 100 pages. Filled with product advertisements, classified ads, colored cartoons, and features galore, the modern newspaper ensured that readers were indoctrinated into daily patterns of commerce and consumption. Readers, in essence, became customers. And just as paper remade readers into consumers, newspapers grew into “formidable institutions, with large buildings, intricate production and circulation systems, and huge numbers of employees” (p. 35).
In Chapter 2, entitled “Making Metropolitans,” Guarneri turns to Philadelphia to examine in close detail just how newspapers constructed modern notions of self for all types of readers. Examining the pages of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Guarneri documents how the newspaper advised women. In its “In and Out of the Household” column, female readers found answers to domestic matters ranging from how to remove stains to how to clean out a clogged chimney. The column also addressed questions relating to middle-class social rituals as well as civic issues such as “inadequate street cleaning” to “unlit streetlamps” (p. 59). In essence, newspapers such as these advised women about how to fit into a modern, urban world by encouraging both civic involvement and proper domestic behavior.
Guarneri also focuses on the influential role of advertisements and comic strips on men and women of all classes. Advertisements taught readers new technologies in the home such as toasters, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners; the delights of prepared foods; and the necessity of owning an automobile. Car companies’ ad campaigns, in fact, helped “to create a more car-centric city infrastructure . . . and a more sprawling city” (p. 78). Cartoons, too, helped readers understand and imagine their own place in the modern world. In reading “Tillie the Toiler,” for example, women could follow the antics of a female secretary, allowing them to “visually tour an urban office setup” and helping to familiarize them “with the idea of men and women sharing a workspace” (p. 90). For men, reading comics that featured the foibles of inept characters, such as Darius Dub or Jerry on the Job, helped ease anxieties of job expectations in their own lives or those projected in advertisements often featuring either brawny or impeccably groomed male models exuding success.
In her examination of New York, Guarneri again examines a wide variety of articles, advertisements, and features to make another key point about the role of the modern newspaper: its ability to render manageable and comforting an immense urban center. New York newspapers were teeming in the period from 1880 to 1920. In the 1890s, the New York World and Journal were at their height of popularity, succeeded in the 1920s by the New York Daily News. Other important newspapers of the era included the Tribune, the Evening Post, the Morning Journal, the Sun, the Globe, as well as more specialized papers such as the Amsterdam News, the Jewish Daily Forward, and three dailies out of Brooklyn, each of which “offered a vision of New York as a whole, a print version of the city that residents browsed, criticized, and partially adopted as their own” (p. 105). Unique features that ensured a “we-feeling” were the papers’ many human interest stories, their reformist, “muck-raking” articles, as well as special sections covering theater, sports, and business. The drama of the everyday—a lost child finding her way home again or a cat stopping traffic—lessened the coldness of the city, whereas the exposing of exploitation and fraud or the exposure of terrible conditions in the slums, hospitals, and factories invited readers to be part of a populist movement to better New York. The highly descriptive accounts of Wall Street, sports, and theater promoted readers’ interest and involvement in multiple arenas of urban life, adding to their sense of belonging and excitement. Guarneri covers and expands upon familiar material in this examination of New York City, but she also adds close readings of a variety of cartoons, advertisements, and mastheads to show how the contrasts of the city were not simply described but celebrated, showing how “anyone could experience the city, or feel they belonged to the city, just by reading a newspaper” (p. 146).
Guarneri explores how city papers worked with real estate developers to advertise and sell the American dream by moving into the suburbs. Examining Chicago papers, she argues that just as newspapers created a sense of belonging for city dwellers, they increasingly introduced readers to the pleasures and convenience of suburban life. Another way of encouraging movement outside of the city was by offering, on a daily basis, a vicarious experience of the city, so as not to feel entirely disconnected from city life. The marriage of commerce and news, while always part of the media business, is made even more evident with the syndication of news and the growth of newspaper chains, the focus of Guarneri’s final chapters. By the 1910s and 1920s, big city newspapers were selling features, articles, and even full-length sections to papers in smaller cities such as Milwaukee, Memphis, San Antonio, and Boise. While local news was never entirely abandoned, the effect of syndication for Guarneri was twofold. On one hand, the effect was greater worldliness, allowing readers to consider their state alongside national and global concerns. On the other hand, the standardization of news created a mass-market mentality that, in essence, “homogenized Americans’ vocabularies and experiences” (p. 195).
Guarneri’s far-ranging, evolving, and deeply researched pages take readers on a mesmerizing journey to a time when newspapers felt new and vital. She helps us see beyond the material page to understand how newspapers served as maps to help readers navigate the city and imagine themselves as modern denizens of a transformative era filled with innovations in technology, mores, fashions, and attitudes. Cities too were formed by the papers they spawned; new buildings dedicated to the print industry began to dot the cityscape, workers poured into cities to work in media, and the printed sheets themselves added to the excitement and drama of the many varied aspects of urban life.
With a focus on predominantly mainstream media, a singular shortcoming of Guarneri’s work is its limited attention to newspapers run by and for those on the outside. This omission is remedied, in part, by Peter G. Vellon’s A Great Conspiracy Against Our Race. Vallon presents a nuanced investigation of the founding and evolution of Italian newspapers in New York and the manner in which they navigated shifting racial tides to construct Italian American identity from 1886 to 1920, specifically in terms of what it means to be Italian, American, and white.
The first point to which Vellon calls attention is the vitality and importance of the Italian American press in New York. He covers twelve Italian American newspapers, based in New York City, with a combined circulation of 250,000 (when just more than 800,000 Italians, in 1920, resided in the city). The most prominent was Il Progresso, founded in 1880 by Carlos Barsotti. Focusing on italianita, the paper celebrated Italian culture and heritage and played an important role creating monuments to this heritage including statues for Giovanni da Verrazzano and Giuseppe Garibaldi, establishing Columbus Circle at 59th Street, and organizing what came to be regular parades in honor of Christopher Columbus. As Italian immigrants did not arrive with a collective consciousness, mainstream papers such as Barsotti’s created one by emphasizing their shared achievements and deserved pride in a rich culture. Such papers also offered tangible “uplift” including employment listings and announcements of local events and services. A rising of a number of radical (or sovversi), such as Il Proletario, that championed the class struggle and class consciousness also emerged during this period.
Initially, Italian American newspaper expressed an affiliation with African Americans, as well as other outsider groups including Asians and Native Americans. These newspapers, for example, vehemently protested the lynching of eleven Italians in New Orleans in 1891 for their alleged role in the murder of city police chief David Hennessy after some of them had been acquitted at trial. At the same time, these papers (Il Progresso in particular) covered and decried similar acts of violence perpetuated on blacks throughout this same period.
By 1910, however, such racial identification subsided. Once asserting their association with other oppressed groups, these same newspapers began to defend Italian American civility and uniqueness in an assertion of whiteness. As Vellon writes, To create an identity as American and white, it was necessary not only to establish that Italians were a civilized race but also to emphasize what they were not. Becoming American was intimately connected to, and often interchangeable with, whiteness. The Italian American assertions of whiteness required a distancing from African Americans with an ardor and urgency clearly lacking in the first two or three decades of mass immigration. The Italian language press increasingly employed this strategy in its quest to secure its group’s status as acceptably white. (p. 121)
In its comics, editorials, and coverage of events, the Italian American press came to depict African Americans as “other” and Italian Americans as both “white” and American. Once great instructors of the perils of “non-whiteness,” these papers, as Vellon asserts, joined forces with a dominant culture that remains torturously racist. Together, Vellon’s, Smith’s, and Guarneri’s important books explore the role the media has long had not only in making readers understand themselves as Americans but also, unfortunately, dividing them against themselves.