The History of American Magazines, 1741–1860

Author(s):  
Heather A. Haveman

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.

Itinerario ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.J. Marshall

In an essay of extraordinary range and depth, which it is difficult to summarise without distortion, Jacob van Leur is above all making an appeal for the autonomy of Asian history in relation to that of Europe. He was reviewing volume IV by Godée Molsbergen of Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch Indië, which dealt with the eighteenth century. To Molsbergen the activities of the V.O.C. in Asia in the eighteenth century had characteristics distinct from those of the seventeenth-century Company or from what was to follow in Indonesia in the nineteenth century. These characteristics essentially reflected those of the Netherlands during the eighteenth century. Assuming that eighteenth-century European history has unifying characteristics (an assumption that he was inclined to question), Van Leur asked: ‘Is it possible to write the history of Indonesia in the eighteenth century as the history of the Company?’ His answer was a resounding ‘no’. In giving his answer he widened the issue from Indonesia to Asia as a whole. ‘A general view of the whole can only lead to the conclusion that any talk of a European Asia in the eighteenth century is out of the question, that a few European centres of power had been consolidated on a very limited scale, that in general – and here the emphasis should lie – the oriental lands continued to form active factors in the course of events as valid entities, militarily, economically and politically.’ He concluded that diere was an ‘unbroken unity’ of Asian history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Until well into the nineteenth century Europe and Asia were ‘two equal civilisations developing separately of each other’.


2013 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Steven Newton

From the 1950s to the 1970s, two sets of scholars – Tom and Joan Flett, and George Emmerson – gleaned many English-language sources to recover aspects of the history of dance in Scotland. They correctly pointed out the pervasive influence of French court culture and the French-trained dancing masters on Scottish forms of dance, including in the Highlands, but did not examine the majority of potential Gaelic sources in their work. This article examines Scottish Gaelic sources referring to dance practices in the Scottish Highlands from the late-seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, placing them within the context of wider European developments in music and dance and confirming that they demonstrate a consciousness of the strong connections with France and corresponding effects on Gaelic dance traditions.


PMLA ◽  
1945 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua H. Neumann

In the history of the English language in the seventeenth century Milton occupies an anomalous position. In his general outlook on the character and problems of the language and in his efforts for linguistic regularity he suggests the rationalizing and standardizing tendencies of the eighteenth century. But in his actual practice in the matters of vocabulary, sentence structure, and syntax, he displays a versatility and extravagance which is characteristically Elizabethan. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate one of these aspects of Milton's English, namely, the chief features of his prose vocabulary, especially as illustrated in his own lexical innovations, and to draw certain conclusions from them in regard to his position as a great enricher of the English language.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avinoam Yuval-Naeh

AbstractThe polemic surrounding the 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill was one of the major public opinion campaigns in Britain in the eighteenth century, as well as the most significant event in the history of Britain's Jews between their seventeenth-century admission and nineteenth-century emancipation. The bill proposed to offer Jews a private act of naturalization without the sacramental test. A costly and cumbersome process, the measure could have had only minor practical impact. Due to its symbolic significance, however, the bill ignited public clamor in hundreds of newspaper columns, pamphlets, and prints. What made it so resonant, and why was the opposition so successful in propagating opposition to the motion? It has been commonly argued that the entire affair was an instance of partisan conflict in which the Jews themselves played an incidental role. This paper throws light on the episode from an alternative perspective, arguing that a central reason for its resonance was that the discussion on the Jews evoked concerns with the expanding financial market and its sociopolitical implications. As Jews had by that time become emblematic of modern finance, they embodied contemporary anxieties about the economy, national identity, and their interrelations.


2014 ◽  
Vol 94 ◽  
pp. 173-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Cooper

Sutton Place, in the county of Surrey, has for many years been misunderstood following an account of the history of the house published in the late nineteenth century. Long believed to be a precocious and little altered building of the early English Renaissance, the house has a very much more complex history than previously supposed. It is shown here that it has been radically altered at least twice, and that its existing symmetrical facade is probably the result of remodelling in the early eighteenth century, incorporating terracotta detail of c 1525–30. Few documents relating to the history of the house survive from before the mid-nineteenth century, and the account given here derives from an examination of the fabric undertaken during repairs and alterations in 1993.


2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 304-315
Author(s):  
Henry Heller

AbstractIn this panoramic survey Guy Lemarchand undertakes to outline the history of the feudal system which persisted across the European continent from the sixteenth until the second half of the nineteenth century. In the crisis of the seventeenth century, seigneurial reaction backed by the absolutist state enabled this feudal mode to reconsolidate and extend itself eastward. The eighteenth century represented the system’s apogee based on high food prices, increased rents and state support. Feudalism’s dissolution beginning with the French Revolution and continuing until the emancipation of the Russian serfs came about as a result of revolution from below and from above under the increasing influence of capitalism and liberalism. Offering an enormous comparative perspective on this long-lived mode of production, Lemarchand’s work fails to articulate theoretically the relationship between this enduring mode and the concurrent rise of capitalism.


2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW R. GOODRUM

Historians of archaeology have noted that prehistoric stone artefacts were first identified as such during the seventeenth century, and a great deal has been written about the formulation of the idea of a Stone Age in the nineteenth century. Much less attention has been devoted to the study of prehistoric artefacts during the eighteenth century. Yet it was during this time that researchers first began systematically to collect, classify and interpret the cultural and historical meaning of these objects as archaeological specimens rather than geological specimens. These investigations were conducted within the broader context of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and natural history. As a result, they offer an opportunity to trace the interrelationships that existed between the natural sciences and the science of prehistoric archaeology, which demonstrates that geological theories of the history of the earth, ethnographic observations of ‘savage peoples’ and natural history museums all played important roles in the interpretation of prehistoric stone implements during the eighteenth century.


2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 645-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Steinfeld

Kunal Parker's “State, Citizenship, and Territory” can be read in at least two ways. Read one way, it tells an important story about how regulation of the poor was driven upward in Massachusetts during the nineteenth century, from the localities to the state. In the seventeenth century, Massachusetts had imposed primary responsibility for care of the poor on its towns. But during the eighteenth century, with the growth of a landless, wandering population, town poor relief budgets came under increasing pressure. The towns responded by lobbying the Massachusetts legislature to pass a series of statutes that made it more and more difficult to acquire a town settlement. People who fell into need in Massachusetts but who had not acquired a town settlement became state paupers for whom the state, rather than any town, was fiscally responsible. As it became more and more difficult to acquire a town settlement, the number of state paupers increased, shifting a portion of the fiscal burden of poor relief from the towns onto the state.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E Underwood ◽  
David Bamman ◽  
Sabrina Lee

This essay explores the changing significance of gender in fiction, asking especially whether its prominence in characterization has varied from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. We have reached two conclusions, which may seem in tension with each other. The first is that gender divisions between characters have become less sharply marked over the last 170 years. In the middle of the nineteenth century, very different language is used to describe fictional men and women. But that difference weakens steadily as we move forward to the present; the actions and attributes of characters are less clearly sorted into gender categories. On the other hand, we haven't found the same progressive story in the history of authorship. In fact, there is an eye-opening, under-discussed decline in the proportion of fiction actually written by women, which drops by half (from roughly 50% of titles to roughly 25%) as we move from 1850 to 1950. The number of characters who are women or girls also drops. We are confronted with a paradoxical pattern. While gender roles were becoming more flexible, the space actually allotted to (real, and fictional) women on the shelves of libraries was contracting sharply. We explore the evidence for this paradox and suggest a few explanations.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document