Provincial Nationalism: Civic Rivalry in Postrevolutionary American Magazines

Abstract

This essay uses magazines as an entry point for analyzing the relationship between print and nation formation in the postrevolutionary era. Produced mainly in the country’s leading urban centers, magazines cultivated an outlook I call “provincial nationalism”; that is to say, magazine literati invoked nationalist rhetoric to publicize the virtuous character and intellectual prowess of their respective communities. Focusing on New York’s American Magazine, Philadelphia’s American Museum, and the Boston Magazine, this essay shows how local cultures of information and exchange stymied attempts at creating a viable national magazine. Collectively, these three titles thus demonstrate that networks, community affiliations, and civic rivalry defined the cultural work of magazines in late eighteenth-century America.