State Magazine

In Regional Interest Magazines of the United States, Sam G. Riley and Gary W. Selnow focus on those magazines that direct their attention to a particular city or region and reach a fairly general readership intersted in entertainment and information. This work is a follow-up to their earlier Index to City and Regional Magazines of the United States. Titles are arranged alphabetically to facilitate access; each entry includes a historical essay on the magazine's founding, development, editorial policies, and content. Entries also include two sections that provide data on information sources and publication history, arranged in tabular form for ready reference. In choosing the magazines to be profiled, Riley and Selnow attempted to represent not only the biggest and most successful of this genre, but also some smaller and newer titles, plus significant earlier magazines that are no longer in print. Special care was also taken to achieve an even geographical spread. To attain greater accuracy, regional writers were enlisted to do the entries on their own region. These writers provide valuable information on how the various magazines began, how conditions have caused them to change, their problems, their editors and publishers, and their content as well as colorful and little known facts of their operation. Magazines were arranged alphabetically, and two informative appendices list the profiled titles by founding date and geographic location. This volume will be a valuable resource for students of magazine publishing history.

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.

Includes titles on all subjects, some in foreign languages, later incorporated into Memorial Library.