What Happened Next

Abstract

This concluding chapter examines the shifts from the early American magazine into the “golden age” of the nineteenth-century American magazine. If the tumultuous birth of the nation was the most tremendous force shaping the first generations of the early republic, by the antebellum period, and especially after the Crash of 1837, the dramatically changing urban landscape was the engine transforming everyday life for millions of Americans—including the ways in which magazines were published and read. It is thus not surprising that the magazine imagined by this country's first century of editors as offering a model for the literary and political foundations of the new nation increasingly became reimagined after 1810 as a refuge from the realities of nation-building. Alongside this history, the chapter also takes a brief look into the advent of the new media “magazine” taking shape as of this publication.