Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860: 26 (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology) - Hardcover

Haveman, Heather A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691164401 ISBN 13: 9780691164403

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

From the colonial era to the onset of the Civil War, Magazines and the Making of America looks at how magazines and the individuals, organizations, and circumstances they connected ushered America into the modern age. How did a magazine industry emerge in the United States, where there were once only amateur authors, clumsy technologies for production and distribution, and sparse reader demand? What legitimated magazines as they competed with other media, such as newspapers, books, and letters? And what role did magazines play in the integration or division of American society? From their first appearance in 1741, magazines brought together like-minded people, wherever they were located and whatever interests they shared. As America became socially differentiated, magazines engaged and empowered diverse communities of faith, purpose, and practice. Religious groups could distinguish themselves from others and demarcate their identities. Social-reform movements could energize activists across the country to push for change. People in specialized occupations could meet and learn from one another to improve their practices. Magazines built translocal communities--collections of people with common interests who were geographically dispersed and could not easily meet face-to-face. By supporting communities that crossed various axes of social structure, magazines also fostered pluralistic integration. Looking at the important role that magazines had in mediating and sustaining critical debates and diverse groups of people, Magazines and the Making of America considers how these print publications helped construct a distinctly American society.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Heather A. Haveman is professor of sociology and business at the University of California, Berkeley.

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"In this exciting new study of antebellum American magazines, Heather Haveman combines a polished narrative with quantitative data to argue persuasively that periodicals have been underappreciated but vital to the nation's literary and political culture. This book is one of the most significant investigations into American magazines since Frank Luther Mott's multivolume history several decades ago."--Jonathan Daniel Wells, University of Michigan

"Heather Haveman has created a comprehensive, rigorous, and profound explanation for the rise of American magazines. Her lucid, impressive research will prove invaluable to historians and sociologists while also engaging the interest of today's journalists."--Daniel Walker Howe, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning What Hath God Wrought

"This superbly documented portrait of the magazine industry from 1741 to 1860 provides a window into the process by which organizations emerge and transform American society. Heather Haveman is a skilled investigator who commands sophisticated social science tools, possesses deep historical knowledge, and has a gift for words, and she shows that magazines can be instruments of both social change and social control. I highly recommend this book."--Howard Aldrich, University of North Carolina

"This book is a marvel of scholarship that marries organization theory with the history of magazines and publishing in America. It is a riveting account of how newspapers and magazines powered the social transformation of American life. Beckoning cultural historians and organization theorists alike, it is a must-read for both groups."--Hayagreeva Rao, Stanford University

"The place of magazines in the early American republic has long been one of media history's major lacunas. Haveman's book makes remarkable strides toward filling this void by documenting the indispensable work that magazines performed in building ties through which many Americans became enmeshed in national causes. Haveman offers a fresh interpretation of American print culture and the making of modernity."--Richard K. Popp, author of The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America

"By masterfully uncovering the mechanisms that explain how magazines facilitated translocal communities and the typology of American modernization, Haveman has written a landmark achievement. Magazines and the Making of America is a breakthrough in our understanding of the dynamic relationships between organizations, institutions, and society. Indeed, I am already citing this book in my own work."--Damon J. Phillips, author of Shaping Jazz

"Tracing founders, geographic locations, content, and relationships to major social movements, this book uncovers the largely forgotten history of magazines in the United States, from their origins in 1741 until the beginning of the Civil War. This definitive account explores the impact that this cultural medium had on the integration of America, and its close association with the religious, economic, and social fault lines that we continue to grapple with today."--Martin Ruef, Duke University

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Magazines and the Making of America

Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860

By Heather A. Haveman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16440-3

Contents

List of Figures and Tables, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xiii, 
Chapter 1 Introduction, 1, 
Chapter 2 The History of American Magazines, 1741–1860, 23, 
Chapter 3 The Material and Cultural Foundations of American Magazines, 55, 
Chapter 4 Launching Magazines, 106, 
Chapter 5 Religion, 143, 
Chapter 6 Social Reform, 187, 
Chapter 7 The Economy, 224, 
Chapter 8 Conclusion, 269, 
Appendix 1: Data and Data Sources, 279, 
Appendix 2: Methods for Quantitative Data Analysis, 307, 
References, 343, 
Index, 395, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Media have tremendous impacts on society. Most basically, books, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet provide us with facts about our world that shape our understanding and our actions: details of political races and sports contests; prices for goods and services; statistics and forecasts about weather and the economy; news of advances in science and medicine; and stories about notable accomplishments, happy occasions, and shameful events. In addition to "just the facts," the media offer us opinions that subtly influence what we know and how we behave: commentaries on politics and the economy; reviews of the arts and literature, entertainment, fashion, and gadgets; praise and criticism of prominent individuals and groups; and advice about health, finances, work, hobbies, romance, and family. Last but not least, the media entertain us with a mix of fact and fiction, both tragedy and comedy. By transmitting facts, opinions, and entertainment, media literally mediate between people, weaving "invisible threads of connection" (Starr 2004: 24) that connect geographically dispersed individuals into cohesive communities whose members share knowledge, goals, values, and principles (Park 1940; Anderson [1983] 1991).

My focus on media leads me away from the view that communities are collections of people with common interests and identities in particular localities (towns, cities, or neighborhoods), which is how urban sociologists tend to define community (e.g., Duncan et al. 1960; Warner 1972; Fischer 1982). I am instead interested in how media like magazines make it possible to build translocal communities — collections of people with common interests, beliefs, identities, and activities who recognize what they have in common but who are geographically dispersed and cannot easily meet face-to-face. Their interactions are literally mediated by media (Tarde 1969; Thompson 1995).

Media support a realm of social life that lies in between the state and the individual, variously labeled "civil society" (Ferguson 1767) or "the public sphere" (Habermas [1962] 1991). This realm of social life is constituted by openly accessible information and communication about matters of general concern; it springs from conversation, connection, and common action. In this realm, people assemble to discuss and engage with politics and public policy, an exercise that is essential for the functioning of democracy. Starting with Alexis de Tocqueville ([1848] 2000), many scholars have argued that the higher the quality of discourse and the larger the quantity of participation in this realm, the stronger the bonds between citizens and the better democracy is served.

But media are involved in many more realms of social life than formal politics. They also deliver educational content in the arts and humanities, the social and natural sciences, medicine and health, business, and engineering and technology; information for people with many different occupations and in many industries; and material designed to appeal to members of particular ethnic groups, religions, and social reform movements, as well as to sports enthusiasts, lovers of literature and the arts, and hobbyists. In all these realms, which lie outside formal politics and which are the focus of this book, media collectively create and sustain diverse communities of discourse, many of which transcend locality and knit together large numbers of people across vast distances. Thus, the development of media helps propel the transition from a traditional society composed primarily of small, local communities to a modern one composed of intersecting local and translocal communities (Higham 1974; Bender 1978; Eisenstein 1979; Thompson 1995; Starr 2004).

I study America because, by the early nineteenth century, the United States was the leader in mass media even though it was sparsely populated and possessed a small, relatively primitive economy (Starr 2004). Moreover, the United States was always an uncertain union. In 1776 it was just barely possible to imagine a federation of thirteen disparate colonies — if not a fully imagined community, then a community of partial inclusion, centered on white male property owners — only because the colonies were strung along the Eastern Seaboard, connected by rivers and the Atlantic, and migration between the colonies had, by the mid-eighteenth century, engendered an intercolonial creole elite whose members shared an "American" mind-set. But even then, the United States was a daring project: an uneasy amalgam of thirteen societies that varied greatly in terms of religion, ethnicity, politics, and economic organization and that were only loosely bound into a federation with a central government whose powers were quite limited. The new nation covered far more territory than any earlier republic and, compounding the difficulties created by distance, it was fringed by a vast wilderness that had not yet been wrested from the grasp of natives or European powers. Political elites fretted that this republic might dissolve (Nagle 1964; Wood 1969; Wiebe 1984). As one founding father neatly summarized the situation, "The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them the same principles in theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprise" (John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, 13 February 1818, quoted in Koch 1965: 228–29).

Elites' concern about the fragility of the new nation was well founded. Just three years after the US Constitution was ratified, the Whiskey Rebellion broke out to contest federal excise taxes on distilled spirits. More generally, state legislators quickly began to formulate mercantilist policies to support their own local economies by blocking the inflow of goods and money from other states, based on the assumption that different states in the American "common market" were competing over capital, labor, and entrepreneurial ingenuity (Scheiber 1972). This concern persisted until after the War of 1812. As Henry Adams remarked in his History of the United States, "Until 1815, nothing in the future of the American Union was regarded as settled. As late as January, 1815, division into several nationalities was thought to be possible" (1921: 219).

If the original thirteen colonies could be conceivably, if optimistically, unified into a single society, by the middle of the nineteenth century the task of maintaining national unity was far more difficult. The nation had expanded tremendously: the Southwestern Territory (comprising first Tennessee, then Alabama and Mississippi) was created in 1790, Louisiana was purchased in 1803 and Florida in 1821, Texas was annexed in 1845 and Oregon partitioned in 1846, and the territory comprising Arizona, California, western Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and part of Wyoming was acquired between 1849 and 1854. As a result, the landmass of the United States almost quadrupled, from 823,000 square miles in 1790 to 1.72 million square miles in 1803, 2.5 million in 1846, and 3.0 million in 1860. Forging a single community from citizens of thirty-three states and several territories spread over such a vast and varied terrain was almost too much to expect, especially given the lack of east–west waterways, the presence of several mountain ranges, and this era's primitive communication and transportation technologies. It is not surprising then that regional differences in culture and community emerged, separating the North from the South, the East from the Midwest and West, and urban from rural. These cultural schisms were fed not only by immense territorial expansion but also by sparse patterns of settlement along the frontier, which made possible the development of novel community structures, including experimental communal groups such as Zoar in Ohio, Nashoba in Tennessee, and St. Nazianz in Wisconsin, many of which were launched as antimodernist responses to industrialization (Kanter 1972; Hindle and Lubar 1986). Industrialization in the Northeast, which contrasted sharply with the largely agricultural and extractive economy that prevailed elsewhere, also contributed to cultural heterogeneity.

This grand experiment in nation building merits our attention now, as social scientists ponder the future of heterogeneous nation-states (e.g., Paul, Ikenberry, and Hall 2003) and pan-national systems like the European Union (e.g., Fligstein 2008). The last century has seen many nations cleaved by civil war, scores of smaller states emerging, recurrent rumblings of discontent among sectarians in a dozen hot spots, the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia, steps toward the unification of Europe into a transnational community, the possibility of that community being dismantled and, most recently, unrest in the Middle East and eastern Europe that may redraw many national boundaries. These events, and the surprise with which both their inhabitants and external observers often respond to them, demonstrate a clear need to understand how diverse societies can grow and thrive, and what role media play in maintaining or undermining comity among subgroups within such societies.

Why Focus on Magazines?

Scholars have until recently paid far less attention to magazines, especially in the early years of their history, than to newspapers and books. This neglect may be due to the contemporary consensus on early magazines, which was neatly summed by one scholar as: "a kind of literary hinterland or vast record of not-so-exciting attempts to institutionalize literacy in the colonies and the early republic vis-à-vis correspondence and news from Europe; amateurish, heavily didactic essays and poems; reprinted speeches and dry historical biographies; and numerous extracts and miscellaneous trifles concerning a range of topics as diverse or leaden as 'sleep,' German etiquette, congressional proceedings, or the condition of the Flamborough Man of War and its 20 swivel guns in 1789. In short ... inaccessible, boring, or simply irrelevant" (Kamrath 2002: 498–99). But magazines — even the earliest ones — are worthy of greater attention, for five reasons. First, compared to newspapers, magazines' contents are quite varied, so they forge social ties in realms that extend far beyond politics and public policy. Such variety in contents is fitting, as the word magazine is derived from the Arabic word for storehouse, makazin. Thus, studying magazines makes it possible to analyze a wide array of communities — not just in formal politics but also in religion, literature and the arts, informal politics, the professions, and among ethnic groups. Second, because their contents are likely to be of more lasting interest than that of newspapers, magazines are not discarded as quickly and so have a more enduring impact. That is why they have long shelf lives, as a visit to any library will attest. Even in the earliest years of the magazine industry, publishers anticipated that their products would be bound and kept for future reference; to that end they used better paper stock than was used for newspapers and offered subscribers indexes, published at the end of each volume, for inclusion when subscribers bound each volume for their personal libraries. Some publishers even offered late-arriving subscribers a full complement of past issues so they would not miss any part of a volume.

Third, because magazines circulate beyond a single town or city, they reach geographically wider audiences than do most newspapers. Fourth, because helping readers interpret facts rather than merely presenting them is a core function of magazines, they are excellent platforms for oppositional stances on many issues. Finally, magazines are serial publications, which allows them to develop rich reciprocal interactions with their readers, something that newspapers can do but books cannot (Okker 2003; Gardner 2012). Their serial nature not only allows magazine publishers to respond to opponents' salvos and adjust their messages to accommodate feedback from readers but also allows them to manage impressions, modify their images to match shifts in readers' tastes and concerns, and forge strong ties to readers through repetition. Moreover, it allows readers to be active participants in magazines by contributing letters and other content. Thus, through cycles of publishing, magazines and readers mutually construct communal identities.

In sum, magazines' varied contents, relative permanence, broad geographic reach, interpretive mission, and serial nature endow them with the power to influence many aspects of social life: formal politics, commerce, religion, reform, science, work, industry, and education. In short, magazines are a key medium through which people pay attention to and understand the things that affect their everyday lives. It is not surprising that early magazine editors recognized these advantages of magazines over other print media. For instance, in his inaugural address, Thomas Condie, publisher-editor of the Philadelphia Monthly Magazine, proclaimed magazines "the literature of the people" (1798: 5.). More grandiosely, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, editor of the United States Magazine (founded 1779) declared that his publication would "in itself contain a library, and be the literary coffee-house of public conversation" (Brackenridge 1779b, 9).

Magazines, Modernization, and Community in America

The story of magazines, modernization, and community requires us to understand both society and culture — both the social relations surrounding goods and services and the patterned meanings people attribute to those goods, services, and social relations. As political scientist Karl Deutsch observed, "Societies produce, select, and channel goods and services. Cultures produce, select, and channel information. ... There is no community nor culture without society. And there can be no society, no division of labor, without a minimum of transfer of information, without communication" (1953: 92, 95). Magazines are central to modernization and community. They are the social glue that brings together people who would otherwise never meet face-to-face, allowing readers to receive and react to the same cultural messages at the same time and, in many cases, encouraging readers to contribute to shared cultural projects.

Magazines can be both instruments of social change and tools of social control that reinforce the status quo. Whenever and wherever the press is free, as it has been in America since the Revolution, magazines are relatively easy to establish. As long as printers have unused capacity, any individual or group with information to disseminate, a point of view to promulgate, a community to build, or a cause to promote can arrange to publish a magazine. Thus magazines, like other communications media, can either reinforce or revolutionize social and cultural patterns (Schudson 1978; Meyrowitz 1985; Fischer 1992; Nord 2004). To the extent that start-up costs are low, magazines are accessible to people in many strata of society, not just socioeconomic elites, as tools of communication and community building.

The story told here begins with the publication of the first magazines in America in 1741 and continues to 1860, the eve of the Civil War, that great cleaving of community, that terrible conflict between a modernizing impulse and a stubborn traditionalism. This temporal scope allows me to trace the institutionalization of this new cultural good to see how magazines evolved from their first appearance, when they were doubtful ventures beset by seemingly intractable problems of supply and demand, into a major communications industry with its own material practices and social conventions. By 1860 magazines had assumed approximately their contemporary print form as bound booklets with covers, issued at regular intervals, and containing a wide variety of reading matter, both verbal and pictorial, that are of more than passing interest and that can be variously narrative, descriptive, explanatory, critical, or exhortative (Wood 1949; Tebbel and Zuckerman 1991). Like their twenty-first-century counterparts, magazine editors in this period identified and wooed authors and illustrators and worked to improve authors' contributions. Starting in 1819 writers were increasingly likely to be remunerated. Publishers throughout this era financed production, sold advertising, managed subscriptions and newsstand sales, and oversaw distribution, while printers created the physical products. Readers paid in advance for subscriptions carried in the mail or purchased magazines when they appeared in local stores, and advertisers paid publishers handsomely to promote their goods and services to readers.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691164401
• ISBN 13: 9780691164403
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 432
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar