Mass Circulation Magazines Research Articles

Magazines and the American Experience

The Grolier Club of New York has been mounting exhibitions of books and prints since 1884, and many of them are recognized as landmark treatments of their subjects. Most of them have also been accompanied by published catalogs or related books. A recent instance was the exhibition, in the early months of 2021, drawn from Steven Lomazow's vast collection of American magazines, consisting of over eighty-three thousand separate issues from 1731 to the present. The substantial and profusely illustrated book that has resulted is a welcome new survey of the subject, for it contains not only a record of the comprehensive exhibition but also fifteen essays written by Lomazow and seven other contributors (five chronological chapters, ten topical ones).The appearance of this book is an occasion for thinking about the status of magazines as research material. Although there is a considerable literature devoted to the history of magazines, they still do not always receive the attention they deserve. For example, author bibliographies generally give detailed physical descriptions of an author's books but simply list the magazine contributions. The illogic of this approach should be obvious, for magazines are printed matter, just as books are, and are thus subject to all the same complications. Two examples will illustrate how copies of supposedly identical issues can vary. In the nineteenth century, individual issues were often reprinted when the supply ran low, so that the publisher would be able to make up complete volumes for sale in a publisher's binding at the end of the year; these second printings were not labeled as such, but they could of course contain textual differences, both intentional and accidental. In the twentieth century, some American magazines had regional “editions” in which the text was shifted around in order to accommodate different advertising, keyed to local markets (the New Yorker is an example); as a result, page citations for a given contribution might not be the same in different copies (and cutting of text could also occur).The illogic of neglecting magazines has implications for biographical, as well as bibliographical and textual, study. There are many instances in which periodical publication was crucial for an author's career. It often provided an author's first public exposure and at any point in a career might have reached a larger audience than the books. Collectors, on whom preservation of the evidence initially depends, have been as guilty as bibliographers of slighting magazines. For instance, they have traditionally paid attention to anthologies that contain first book appearances of particular works (because they are “books”), without recognizing that issues of magazines are also anthologies (and frequently of more significance for promoting an author's reputation). Preservation relies also on institutional libraries to do their part; but (although “little magazines” now seem to be safe from further destruction) mainstream and mass-circulation magazines (both present and past) are continually being discarded by libraries in favor of digital reproductions. And reproductions are no more adequate as substitutes for the originals of magazines than they are for books, since they do not provide a basis for studying the unreproducible physical details that affect the reading experience and are essential for bibliographical research. Furthermore, since copies of a magazine issue can vary (just as copies of a book can), the number of copies that are preserved is a serious concern.These are among the considerations that make one glad to see Lomazow's book, for here is a collector who has focused on magazines for their own sake. Even though his book does not go into the matters I have raised, it can still serve to publicize the cause. One hopes that it, along with the wide attention his exhibition received, will stimulate appreciation of the importance of magazines in cultural history and the consequent need to collect and preserve them.

“Not Buried Yet”: Northern Responses to the Death of Jefferson Davis and the Stuttering Progress of Sectional Reconciliation

AbstractThis article, the first detailed scholarly assessment of northern responses to the death of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis in December 1889, contributes to ongoing academic debates over the troubled process of sectional reconciliation after the Civil War. Southern whites used their leader's funeral obsequies to assert not only their affection for the deceased but also their devotion to the Lost Cause that he had championed and embodied. Based on an analysis of northern newspapers and mass-circulation magazines in the two weeks after Davis's death, the essay demonstrates that many northerners, principally Republican politicians and editors, Union veterans, and African Americans, were outraged by southerners’ flagrant willingness to laud a man whom they regarded as the arch-traitor and that they remained opposed to reconciliation on southern terms. However, despite continuing concerns about public displays of affection for the Confederacy evident at the time of Davis's reinterment in Richmond in May 1893, northern opposition to the Lost Cause waned rapidly in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Full-blown sectional reconciliation occurred after the Republicans gave up on their efforts to enforce black voting rights in the South and President William McKinley's imperialist foreign policy necessitated, and to some degree garnered, support from southern whites. The death of Jefferson Davis, therefore, can be seen as an important event in the difficult transition from a heavily sectionalized postwar polity to a North-South rapprochement based heavily on political pragmatism, sentiment, nationalism, and white supremacism.

The Dark Side of Social Desire: Violence as Metaphor, Fantasy and Satire in Argentina, 1969–1975

The 1970s was the most violent decade of the entire twentieth century for Argentina. Its first half was characterised by the rise of political radicalisation, and its second by the reign of state repression. Studies devoted to investigating the issue of violence in the 1970s have concentrated fundamentally on the protagonists. By contrast, this article offers an analysis of the symbolic terrain, shifting focus from the conscious to the unconscious plane, from the real to the imaginary world. Dealing with visual representations of violence in popular culture, especially advertising in mass-circulation magazines, it explores how violence became naturalised during the first half of the 1970s. In so doing it adds an additional layer to our understanding of the social mood that preceded the military coup of March 1976.

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and “Thank You for the Light”

The publication of new writing by F. Scott Fitzgerald is always an o ccasion for commentary and interpretation. The most recent piece of unpublished fiction to appear from Fitzgerald’s hand is “Thank You for the Light,” a fift een-hundred-word vignette that was published for the first time in the 6 August 2012 issue of the New Yorker. (The story appeared simultaneously in the online e dition of the magazine at www.newyorker.com and can now be p urchased as a Kindle e dition for ninety-nine cents.) In the paragraphs below I will supply some b ackground about Fitzgerald’s story and offer a few possibilities for its interpretation, in cluding the suggestion that Fitzgerald intended “Thank You for the Light” as an answer of sorts to Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933).

Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired A Generation of American Women by Barbara Sicherman (review)

Reviewed by: Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired A Generation of American Women by Barbara Sicherman Frank Warren Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired A Generation of American Women. By Barbara Sicherman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2010. Barbara Sicherman’s Well-Read Lives is an important study of the impact of reading on young women growing up in the Gilded Age who departed from the traditional path of domesticity to lead lives as journalists, physicians, educators, and social reformers. Sicherman discusses the response of young women to Alcott’s Little Women. Whereas some modern critics interpret the novel as disciplining young women due to Jo’s marriage, the vast majority of young women read the book as opening up horizons for personal fulfillment. Differences in how individuals of different class and ethnic backgrounds read Little Women lead into a discussion of the different ways young women read literature. Lonely and ashamed of having “no school experience” (58), Florence Kelley read her father’s large library with apparently “neither joy nor enlightenment” (59). In contrast, Alice Stone Blackwell read voraciously with passion. In the succeeding chapters, Sicherman explores the reading of specific women. She studies the Hamilton family, whose two most famous members were Edith Hamilton and her sister, Alice. What interests Sicherman here is reading as a family affair and how the family immersion in literature continued to connect them in their later [End Page 194] lives and led to a “reciprocal relation . . . between fiction and life” (97). In contrast to this communal reading, M. Carey Thomas’s reading started out as a more individualistic endeavor. Burned severely as a child, Thomas developed her reading during a lengthy period of recovery. She emerged as a “Romantic Victorian” (111). After graduating from Cornell, Thomas and four friends from wealthy Baltimore families formed “Friday Night” where they shared their literary readings (they championed rebels like Shelley, Godwin, and Swinburne), their gender politics, and their friendship. There were limits to their rebelliousness, but clearly the spirit of rebellion led to self-definitions that spurred later careers. Discussing Jane Addams, Sicherman explores the role of Addams’ early readings in solving her personal crisis and finding meaning in the establishment of Hull House. Ambiguous about “high culture,” Addams was afraid it divorced itself from the real life of social injustice. Her readings of Comte, Tolstoy, and George Eliot helped her see the possibilities of a meaningful life. Among Jewish immigrants, Mary Antin’s immersion in books served as an entrance into the American life she celebrated, while for Rose Cohen, books like David Copperfield helped her understand her social condition. Ida B. Wells, the subject of the final chapter, claimed that as a youth she had “never read a Negro book” (225). Her early readings included Alcott, Dickens, Bronte, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Sicherman says, however, that Wells had “no difficulty reading herself into the texts of white authors” (225). Certainly Shakespeare, whose passages Wells recited in Memphis lyceums in the early 1880s, contributed to her impressive oratorical style in her activist career as an anti-lynching crusader. Using archives, diaries, and autobiographies, Sicherman is persuasive on the role of reading in shaping women’s lives during the Gilded Age and Progressive period. At the same time she understands that class, race, and gender intertwined with reading. She also persuasively argues that the literary culture of the late nineteenth century was a woman’s culture with opportunities for women authors and with the majority of readers being women. However, it is important to remember that the editors of the leading mass circulation magazines that women wrote for and consumed were all men, men who shared certain visions of literature and helped define the women’s literary culture and helped serve as arbiters of taste. Frank Warren Queens College, City University of New York Copyright © 2012 Mid-America American Studies Association

An Age In Need of Prophets

There was a time when prophets circulated among the population. They served as a social rebalancing force, and the people who had an open heart would begin to recalibrate their way of being in the world. More than ever do we need prophetic voices in our midst. Tikkun magazine is such a voice.I still remember the time when Commentary magazine served the purpose of bringing together the voices of global concern, clarifying Jewish values, and being open to some gems from the tradition. When its orientation shifted and it became a cheerleader for neocon politics, it really became necessary for a prophetic organ to be created in the Jewish world.When Tikkun was founded, its name made clear its intent to repair and establish a means by which the values of tikkun olam would have their moral and ethical effect on not only the Jewish community but also the larger American and global ones. Even choosing a Hebrew name for a mass circulation magazine was an attempt to say clearly: we are no longer the generation of Jews that is willing to hide our deep commitment to Judaism in order to gain intellectual or political respectability in America. During these twenty-five years, Tikkun magazine and the social/political organism it created under the devoted and persistent leadership of Rabbi Michael Lerner have become a voice that is taken seriously in American public discourse, as well as by those in the Jewish community who are not too terrified to listen to the prophetic voices that Rabbi Lerner assembles in the magazine and in his public conferences.I wish Rabbi Lerner many more years of health and spiritual feistiness, and at the same time I pray that others in the Jewish world and in the larger spiritual world (including many gifted non-Jewish spiritual thinkers) will respond to Rabbi Lerner’s appeal to join him in shaping the future directions of the magazine so that he can reduce his role in Tikkun (which may in a few years be primarily an online magazine for environmental, generational, and financial reasons) and dedicate more of his time to producing the spiritual Torah commentary to which he is committed and to writing more of the inspiring and significant books of his that have already played a major role in American public discourse.Whatever those new directions, I hope that Tikkun in the next quarter-century will continue to do some of what I find most exciting in the past twenty-five years of the magazine:To make people aware of the value and impact of tradition and spirituality in the service of healing the planet.To propose visions that lead to more peace and global cooperation between individuals and governments.To be a strong voice challenging all traditions, and to take their valuable and precious magisterium and bring it up to date in an ecumenically friendly way.To promote the ways in which shared worship will be able to inspire and motivate people to take what was experienced in the synagogue, temple, church, or mosque and the world as a witness of God’s presence in the lives of people.To give a forum to the next generation of emerging teachers and critics of society.To support women’s intervention in male-dominated spaces so that they may share from their naturally nurturing perspective and counter the raucous clamor of conflicting masculine ideologies.To use the linear means of word and print in the service of enchantment for souls, aesthetics for hearts, and enlightenment for spirit.To mine the Jewish tradition and others for gems of inspiration and to show current applications of what used to be normative values and treat them as illustrative, exploring how they could be used today.To promote forms of enterprise for transnational and national corporations based on sharing and cooperation in which management, shareholders, and workers—as well as the end-users—will receive equitable value.And lastly, to encourage people to become aware of how fortunate we after all are to live on this amazing planet, in this important historical moment, and to share blessing with one another.That Tikkun has already paved this direction for the past twenty-five years is plenty of reason to celebrate it, and to seek the support of visionaries to help Tikkun both financially and creatively with prose writing, poetry, art, music, and dance. I urge everyone connected to Jewish Renewal or other forms of religious and spiritual renewal to both subscribe and read it carefully!

Cover Stories: English Football Magazine Cover Portrait Photographs 1950–1975

Charles Buchan's Football Monthly and Goal were two mass-circulation football magazines. This comparative case study of the portraits of professional footballers featured on their covers in the first years of their publication, the early 1950s and late 1960s respectively, situates this type of football portrait photograph in its historical context, tracing its origins in art and early photography, as well as discussing the cultural and social influences which contributed to its changing format. Such photographs are considered not as isolated artefacts, but as part of a series or sequence in which significant periods of continuity or change can be discerned. The potential audiences for these visual images, as well as the ambiguities and complexities of discerning their interpretation and reception by contemporaries, are analysed. These photographs, it argues, alongside other sources, reveal how some of professional football's advocates, at specific historical moments, attempted to promote an elevated image of its protagonists as embodiments of a particular style of admirable working-class masculinity, the model professional.

Beyond the Bounds of the Book: Periodical Studies and Women Writers of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Scholars of realist and modernist literature have been slower than scholars of earlier eras to embrace challenges of periodical studies, but they are now taking up task. Certainly, need to integrate study of periodicals into a broad vision of literary history is obvious. Precisely because writing published in periodicals lacks prestige and status of bound book, is an essential source for scholars who seek insight into writers who--by virtue of their gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, or other factors--have lacked access to most privileged venues of American letters. Yet for most part, literary critics are much better at reading books than newspapers and magazines. Since periodicals, by definition, are texts that appear at regular intervals, they make a liability of critical tendency to privilege a single text. (1) Moreover, a rigid, excessively narrow focus on status of authors and aesthetic value has often impoverished literary historians' treatments of newspapers and magazines. As feminist media historians have argued, a more flexible, broader approach is needed. (2) With this perspective in mind, I offer an overview in this essay of how scholars of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women writers have responded to challenges of studying periodicals. After opening with a snapshot of turn-of-the-century periodical culture and women's central place in that culture, I discuss basic theoretical and methodological questions in field: What is relationship between literary history and periodical history? How can literary critical methodologies do justice to unwieldy, multifarious nature of periodicals? In proposing new frameworks for study, including transnational exchanges and collaborative interdisciplinarity, I review some of most significant recent research under three broad, interrelated rubrics: how periodicals fostered a vital tradition of African American women's writing, how they circulated new modes of psychic interiority, and how they created new possibilities for subjectivity and self-display. Even within limited time frame of decades around turn of century, this review is far from exhaustive; although addresses some studies of fiction and poetry published in periodicals, focuses primarily on nonfiction writings, either examined on their own or as a revelatory context for fiction. Scholars who have taken up periodicals as an object of study in their own right are doing more than unsettling canonical traditions. They are reorienting our understanding of how culture works, what means to read and write, and why gender matters. Historians agree that at turn of twentieth century, readers in United States had access to more and different kinds of journals than at any other time in nation's history. As cost of newsprint plummeted in final decades of nineteenth century, advertising revenues skyrocketed, leading to emergence of world's first mass-circulation magazines and newspapers. Yet media historian Paul Starr has argued convincingly that, contrary to widely held view that mass production led to a more standardized, homogenous culture, the early mass media in America added more to cultural diversity than they subtracted from it (250-51). In other words, despite rise of corporate influence in journalism, mainstream journals were just one part of phenomenon. In their overview of publishing in United States from 1880 to 1940, distinguished print-culture historians Karl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway conclude that even as print culture was being nationalized, consolidated, and incorporated, multiple new venues and new specialized publications were constantly appearing. This vibrant environment created new, cross-cutting possibilities for construction of identities and creation of communities that were sometimes generated in response to racialized, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies of power, and sometimes through elected affinity based on shared interests (Framework 21). …

“China Wahala”: the Tribulations of Nigerian “Bushfallers” in a Chinese Territory”1

Recent scholarly studies and media coverage have primarily focused on China’s increasing presence and sometimes asymmetrical engagement with Africa in tandem with the new trend of Chinese migration to that continent. Yet, the inverse flux of Africans to China and the emergence of African communities in Southern China over the last decades is influencing some areas of the Pearl River Delta Region, and changing the fabric of cities like Guangzhou, Macau and Hong Kong, in a way without precedent. There are representations or exotic descriptions from some mass circulation magazines and newspapers on the infamous Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong or the so-called “Chocolate-city,”an area centered aroundHongqiao, the village-district and Canaan market in the city of Guangzhou, with its arcades and strip malls filled with ethnic businesses and transnational migrants. In Macau, significant concentrations of African population of different origins are also seen in the “Papa pun” commercial center or in downtown areas. Despite many studies devoted to the “ethnoburbs” in other latitudes, only very recently, these entrepreneurial African communities in Mainland China are starting to become worthy of serious scholarly attention. Yet,there is total absence of studies dealing with the presence of more and more African students and the cultural manifestations of African communities well portrayed in the new African cinema, in music produced by Afro-Chinese bands or even singers.2Besides a continuing inward flow of transient Africans who come to China for business on a regular basis, a significant number of settler African traders, particularly Nigerians, have already married local Chinese women, set up families, autonomously run their businesses without recourse to Chinese intermediaries, and established a web of informal and formal committees representing their home nations and states, to solve disputes while maintaining personal and business links with Africa. Besides, those emigrant ‘bushfallers’ who are coming to China solely for business purposes, a new form of “silent” migration of Nigerians comprising students from different backgrounds is enrolling in higher education institutions in the Macau Special Administrative Region of China. These students are coming to pursue their studies or to seek a job to pay their student fees at the margin of the PRC scholarship and stipendprograms for visiting African students that were popular in China in the 1960s and mid-1970s as part of CCP’s foreign policy for Third World aiming friendly relations with Africa. Today, these “transnational” Nigerian students are in their own way affirming their identity and difference, in southern China, in particularly in Macau SAR, thanks to their network of multiple interrelations across nation-states from Africa to Asia and to a combination of perseverance, zeal, and gentleness without subservience. Although they have not been targets for the hostility and even violence like the Shanghai incident of July 1979 or the Nanjing protests in December 1988 at Hehai University targeting African students, today these Nigerian students are facing more subtle forms of ethnocentrism and legal discrimination from immigration laws to daily practices, which always try to associate their citizenship to problematic or easy stereotypes of scam or colour.3 Yet, at the same time, everything seems to indicate that these newcomers are quick adapting and finding new forms of negotiating their social integration in the Chinese local society which in turn is offering more opportunities.This paper is part of a more ambitious project which aims to assess the new forms of migration from Africa to China and from China to Africa as well as their impact and contribution of globalization. First, this paper considers why and how Macau has evolved from a Portuguese outpost where slavery was a an institutionalized commodity to special administrative region of China where a new urban African community, mostly composed by Nigerian students, is in formation due to opportunities and rapid changes occurring in the region in the first years of the twenty-first century, by comparing the new to old African communities of students and business people/migrant workers from former Portuguese colonies (Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique).Finally, borrowing the title from a sequel movie with the same title of the promising New African cinema, the paper focus on the “China Wahala”or the troubles of these Nigerian students through their tales of their experiences of racism(s) and their negotiations and responses which radically contradicts not only the slogans of cultural diversity propagated by the official discourse and tourist channels as these Nigerians are confronted daily with often dramatic situations ranging from indifference and ostracism to exclusion.

"Not so much art as a financial operation": Conrad and Metropolitan Magazine

"Not so much art as a financial operation"Conrad and Metropolitan Magazine Laura L. Davis Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Metropolitan Magazine, February 1918, cover. Illustration by E. L. Crompton. [End Page 244] Metropolitan Magazine (see figure 2) was launched in 1895 during what Richard Ohmann calls the "inaugural moment" of a "national mass culture" in the United States, purveyed especially through the twenty mass-circulation magazines in print by 1900 (23, 29). Although for its first fifteen years Metropolitan lagged behind circulation giants of the era, such as Cosmopolitan, McClure's, and Munsey's, Alfred A. Knopf, at Doubleday, Page Company, wrote to Joseph Conrad in 1913, "I am fairly convinced that the Metropolitan is going to be pretty soon one of the three or four really important popular magazines that we have."1 That year, copies sold numbered four hundred thousand, with the editor claiming total readership of 1 million or more, a circulation that had it pulling level with or ahead of its competitors.2 Like its peer "mixed function" magazines, Metropolitan treated public affairs, current events, and other topics of general interest, along with fiction (Reed 76). To attract an audience, it chose a title embodying the notion that the city was a wide, encompassing area and offering all readers in a huge country peppered with small towns access to those amenities available to city dwellers—including ideas and culture.3 By the early 1910s, readers were experienced consumers of topical issues, having digested the muckraking journalism of the century's first decade, a time in which "[e]ditors now posited readers bold and urbane enough to look into the social abyss or at its shabby margins" so they were in a position "to see, to know, to judge, to imagine remedies" (Ohmann 285). They also had had for a generation access to literary culture through publications that were more affordable than literary magazines such as Harper's Monthly Magazine [End Page 245] (Ohmann 6). Metropolitan's 1 million readers thus experienced Conrad's work mediated through their position as popular readers, their relationship with the magazine, and the packaging of each issue, a form for his work probably more familiar to them than that of the bound book. As they began an issue of Metropolitan, president H. J. (Henry James) Whigham set the tone with his vigorously Progressive editorials. Managing editor Carl Hovey then presented them with six or seven stories in each number, selected according to his and Whigham's definition of the Metropolitan reader. During their decade of leadership at the magazine in the 1910s, they determined to pull ahead of their competition by strengthening both its political voice and its fiction. In doing so, they drew Conrad into a relationship with the magazine—one beneficial to both sides. The Evolution of Metropolitan Magazine Starting out as a "naughty picture" magazine selling "sex sensationalism," Metropolitan in its earliest issues depended on photographs of stage actresses, art models, and bloomered and bathing-suited beauties, while giving little attention to politics or fiction (Mott 4: 47; 5: 145). Despite its lack of political thrust through the first decade of the twentieth century, from the beginning the magazine followed the career of Theodore Roosevelt, first featuring him at work as police commissioner of New York in October 1895 (Parker). As it matured, Metropolitan continued to define itself among popular magazines in terms of its public responsibility and its place as a publisher of fiction. At the end of the muckraking era, Metropolitan avowed that it had deliberately avoided such journalism, but asserted an interest in issues of social justice without sensationalizing. At the same time, it declared a dedication to print "[t]he best short-story writers of this country and England," as it included Joseph Conrad in a list of thirty-four writers—most of them not widely recognized today ("Magazine" 556).4 However, while Metropolitan signified its commitment to fiction by trading on Conrad's name, it had not yet contracted with him for a story, and it would be two years before his first work would appear in the magazine, when "Prince Roman" was published as "The Aristocrat" in...

Racial disparities in magazine coverage of mammography.

Abstract Abstract #5100 Background: African-American (AA) women are diagnosed with breast cancer later, at a higher stage disease, and have a higher mortality than European-American (EA) women. AA women have a lower rate of mammography screening and this lower rate may account, in part, for AA women's more severe disease at diagnosis and higher mortality. One possible reason for this racial disparity in mammography screening may be that AA women receive a different message than EA women from mass circulation magazines about mammography.
 Material and Methods: A computer-aided content analysis was performed of AA and EA women's magazines with a circulation of greater than one million that contained at least 1,000 words across all the mammography-related articles or sections of articles that were published between January 1, 2002 and December 31, 2007. The words that shared similar meanings were grouped into seven categories: (1) religiosity, (2) activity, (3) positive and (4) negative emotions, (5) medical terms, (6) risk factors, (7) race portrayed, by which is meant when race was noted in articles as African American/Black or European American/White. The frequencies of each word were counted across all articles by type of magazine, i.e., predominately AA readers and EA readers. The Pearson product-moment method was used to calculate correlations, the Student's t-test was used for correlated samples to compare the means of the continuous variables, and McNemar's test was used to assess the difference between two correlated proportions. Significance was set at the 0.05 level.
 Results: The magazines that met the study criteria were the African-American magazines Ebony and Essence and the European-American magazines Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, Redbook, and Vogue. The six magazines yielded the following total number of words per magazine that focused on mammography: (a) Ebony: 17,221 words, (b) Essence: 20,257 words, (c) Good Housekeeping: 12,998 words, (d) Marie Claire: 7,654 words, (e) Redbook: 29,201 words, and (f) Vogue: 11,482 words. The word categories were compared in terms of their relative word frequencies, AA and EA.
 
 Discussion: There were clear differences in the mammography messages presented in the AA and the EA magazines. The AA magazines contained more references to religiosity, activity, positive and negative emotions, and risk. It was striking that racial references to African Americans were ubiquitous in the African-American magazines, whereas, racial references to either African Americans or European Americans were almost completely absent from the European-American magazines. Citation Information: Cancer Res 2009;69(2 Suppl):Abstract nr 5100.

Making ModernPoetry: Format, Genre and the Invention of Imagism(e)

Although much attention has recently been given to modern little magazines, critics largely have failed to consider how the bibliographical elements of these magazines were instrumental in their production and dissemination of poetic modernism. Focusing on Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, this article argues for the importance of these elements, showing how format leads to form. It contends that Poetry extended the poetic presentation already at work in middlebrow mass circulation magazines, turning the poem into an aesthetic object for contemplation isolated on the page and framed by a border of white space. Subsequently this promoted a consolidation of genre and an opening up of form that pitted “poetry” against popular “verse.” Finally, this article shows that these formal and generic innovations uniquely positioned Poetry to showcase Imagism(e) and offers a re-reading of one of its most lasting examples, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.”

Science, Advocacy, and "The Sacred and Intimate Things of Life": Representing Motherhood as a Progressive Era Cause in Women's Magazines

Science, Advocacy, and "The Sacred and Intimate Things of Life":Representing Motherhood as a Progressive Era Cause in Women's Magazines Jennifer Burek Pierce (bio) Motherhood has a long tradition of sentimentality in the United States and an even longer tradition of politicization. These perspectives on motherhood created a tension that played out on the pages of women's magazines during the Progressive Era. During these years, reformers called attention to little acknowledged risks involved in childbearing. Dissonance between the real and the idealized was strongly reflected in coverage of the Maternity and Infancy Act of 1921, a measure designed to reduce recently-documented death rates for pregnant women and new-born children.1 Advocates for the Act contrasted the number of preventable deaths and injuries resulting from childbirth with the nation's prosperity and benevolence in the face of other compelling needs.2 A continuing stream of articles about women's reproductive health, in tandem with reform efforts, focused public attention on what had been a personal matter. Motherhood, popularly understood as the individual effort of caring for one's own children and described before Congress as one of "the sacred and intimate things of life,"3 acquired a collective aspect that united women to lobby for government aid. As the maternal became political, women's magazines reflected a tension between popular romanticized notions of motherhood and personal realities of child bearing, changing the ways these periodicals engaged their readership. Even as mass circulation women's magazines featured Jessie Willcox Smith's idyllic domestic images on their covers, their pages told stories of women's fatal hemorrhages and infections that cost the lives or health of their children. Conversely, specialty publications created to support political aims began to focus on mothering, a theme that had not been part of their discourse in preceding years. As they asked [End Page 69] their readers to reconsider the experience of motherhood, women's magazines published articles and images that engaged issues differently than they had before. Politics and the legislative process began to feature in mass circulation magazines, while advocacy-oriented titles came to acknowledge the emotional associations of motherhood in their pages. These alterations were neither instantaneous nor absolute. Instead, these editorial shifts constitute tangible evidence of the alliances women were forming in support of maternal health legislation. Activism on behalf of the Maternity and Infancy Act brought together suffragists and club women, many of whom would have been in different political camps in the debate over suffrage. This convergence of their readerships' views meant women's magazines would, if not actually close the gap between differing editorial directions, then at least begin to resemble one another more nearly in their coverage of this issue. Simultaneously feminine and feminist in their reportorial stances, women's magazines advocated for legislation to redress the risks inherent in reproduction before pre-natal care, antibiotics, health insurance, or hospital births. Mass circulation and specialty periodicals alike during the 1920s promoted the issue of maternal health, each adapting their characteristic tenor to this new subject. This adaptation involved negotiating tensions among magazine identity, motherhood's cultural resonances, and women's recently gained right to vote. The effects of that negotiation varied by publication venue, with a popular title like Good Housekeeping ardently urging activism and the militant Woman Citizen softening its image, both invoking motherhood as a newly political matter. These periodicals aligned in their re-creation of maternity as a public and scientific matter, altering their own identities as they sought to change the conditions in which women gave birth and raised their children. Motherhood and Magazines Transformed: Sites of Activism in Print Women's magazines have been thought to mirror their times rather than beckon their readers toward more egalitarian futures, but this perspective is complicated by Progressive Era publications on maternal and child health. Most historiography of popular women's magazines has emphasized the conventional content of women's periodicals.4 A focus on children and family, albeit complicated by unacknowledged ideologies, is sometimes cited as exemplifying this orientation.5 Commonly criticized as alike in their presentations of sentimental, status quo, or consumer-oriented material, American women's magazines from the early twentieth...

The Portrayal of Asian Americans in Mainstream Magazine Ads: An Update

Mass-circulation magazines were analyzed for the frequency and nature of advertising portrayals of Asian Americans, along several dimensions related to the “model minority” stereotype. Findings were compared with those for African Americans and Hispanics. Despite some improvement in the frequency and scope of representation, the presence of Asian Americans is still limited to narrowly defined stereotypical roles. Logistic regression analyses provided further support for the findings. Drawing on both cultivation and expectancy-violation theory frameworks, the authors suggest that, to the extent that the stereotype is reflected and reinforced through advertising, biased and undue expectations may be formed, resulting in negative consequences for the group members.

Native American Picture Books of Change: The Art of Historic Children's Editions (review)

Reviewed by: Native American Picture Books of Change: The Art of Historic Children’s Editions Susan Gardner (bio) Native American Picture Books of Change: The Art of Historic Children’s Editions. By Rebecca C. Benes . Foreword by Gloria Emerson . Santa Fe, NM: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2004. No citizen of the United States is immune from the major sources of stereotyping American Indians: the electronic media, advertising, and children's literature. As all of these play powerful roles in the socialization of mainstream (and even Indian) youth, it is hard to outgrow these images and fantasies. However, traditional Native American societies, in their oral storytelling (dating back at least 30,000 years), had little concept of what we call "children's literature," which, interestingly, is defined by its audience: the "protected class" of modern childhood in the Western European-derived world. Traditional Native American conceptions of "the self" locate its origins in ancestral time out of mind; children are the ancestors reborn; the notion of an "individual" attains significance as a function of kinship placement and membership of a prior and over-arching social whole, the People. Moreover, in non-Western, traditional societies, it was assumed that understanding the stories grew with time; endings did not have to be happy, nor were certain subjects taboo; and oral narrative/storytelling was the means by which cultures preserved their memory, history, knowledge, and wisdom. As one elder has said, "We are Indian people because we tell each other Indian stories." During the Treaty-making era, although treaties in international law are conducted between sovereign entities, Federal law had already classified Native Americans as "domestic dependent nations." A predictable rhetoric perceiving them as children or wards under the Great Father's protection ensued, particularly when land cessions became involved (1784–1868). No other American ethnic "minority" is paternally administered by a sub-Cabinet agency, in this case the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the U.S. Dept. of the Interior. In the later nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, when assimilation and forced deculturation within government and church-run off-reservation boarding schools were Federal policy after the confinement of Native Americans to reservations, an unforeseen effect of suppressing Native languages and cultural practices was the development of pan-Indian identities and a nascent literature in a new, shared language: English. One way to address a mainstream audience, early Native writers discovered, was via "children's literature." The entrée of American Indian-authored stories into the Euramerican literary [End Page 333] mainstream was thus by dint of their infantilization. (Salishan) Mourning Dove's Coyote Stories sanitized the great Trickster. (Dakota) Charles Eastman and his Euramerican wife Elaine Eastman's Wigwam Evenings domesticated traditional narrative. One of (Mohawk) performing artist E. Pauline Johnson's forums was mass-circulation magazines for children and their parents. During the same time period, English-born artist Ernest Thompson Seton started the Woodcraft Indian societies for Canadian and American white youth. In England, the Boy Scouts (founded in 1908) and the Girl Guides (1910) were negligibly influenced by Seton's model, but in North America The Boy Scout Handbook evolved from Seton's The Birch-bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians. In 1911, the Camp Fire Girls was established. This imitative trend survives in YMCA summer camps where Euramerican children acquire "Indian" names, clan affiliations, and survival skills. However honorable the values taught, Euramerican children are only playing at being Indians, during "quality" "down" time. In the boarding schools, Native American children were not playing at being white. They had no choice in the matter. A heavily propagandistic literature took aim at graduates of Native American boarding schools to ensure that they would maintain the intended allegiance to white, "clean," and Christian values. Novelist Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), doyenne of American Indian women writers of the Southwest, recalls Stiya: the Story of an Indian Girl, published by the U.S. War Dept. in 1881 and written by a white woman, Marion Bergess (masquerading as "Tonka," a meaningless name). Bergess had been a teacher and dormitory matron at the notorious Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, PA, whose former military founder Richard Pratt's philosophy was "to...

Selling College Literacy: The Mass-Market Magazine as Early 20th Century Literacy Sponsor

At the turn into the 20th century, mass-market magazines offered their readers powerful images of national preoccupations, among them the modern college system. In October, 1899, for example, the Saturday Evening Post featured on its "College Man's Number" cover an image of two male figures, one in academic garb holding books and another in a football uniform holding a football (see Figure 1). Emblematic of the modern "college man," together the two stand arm in arm, loyal and serious to the school and to each other. The image suggests, perhaps, that college is not only a scene of academic pursuit but also popular, boyish social pursuits such as football. No longer the provenance of mainly the wealthy seeking training in the sober pursuits of the ministry or law, as in the preceding century, college is re-defined here to include those engaged in the common life of the country. Although this cover, and others in the years after, played a large part in creating a powerful mythology about college, editorial material and advertisements inside the magazines confirmed and detailed that mythology for readers. Representations of the modern college—in fiction, non-fiction, editorials, and advertisements—as a place and an experience receptive to middle class youth, in particular, contributed to a normalization of college as a literacy pathway for many who wished to advance economically and socially. If magazines of this time provided instruction in what Richard Ohmann has called the "springs and levers" of the new economy and society, then a part of that effort went into educating young people in the new processes and purposes that advanced literacy itself would take in training and employment.1 In this sense, the "selling" of the modern college and university system began not only in high school classrooms and other "official" venues that prepared students for advanced study, but also in popular venues, among them mass-circulation magazines. [End Page 163] Click for larger view Figure 1 Cover, "College Man's Number," Saturday Evening Post (October 28, 1899). In this essay, I first discuss literacy developments brought about through the increased popularity and success of mass-circulation magazines in this period. Against this backdrop, I then turn to how these magazines, particularly the Saturday Evening Post, promoted colleges as modern institutions fit to train young people, especially young men, for success and advancement in society. In treating this material, I attempt to paint a fairly richly textured picture of literacy—including not only representations of reading and writing in editorial material and advertisements, but also first-hand participation in literacy experiences made possible by the magazines—in order to foreground the tacit partnership of colleges and magazines in promoting and developing an overall understanding of literacy for the modern economy and society. This included situating colleges as primary "literacy sponsors," in Deborah Brandt's term, for those past high school age and normalizing a college education as a natural next literacy step for those aspiring to employment in middle class business or professional positions.2 Literacy sponsors, in this view, offer training in a particular use or set of uses of reading and writing with advantages both to the buyer and seller. In the process, literacy itself takes on understandings that may come to be seen as natural or inevitable. Magazines, literacy sponsors themselves, also formed an informal alliance with the modern college system by favorably representing college literacy opportunities. [End Page 164] By taking an approach that treats college education as a form of "literacy," I mean to place the reading and writing work of college in the context of a wider notion of literacy that takes into account informal experiences with printed text. Students, in this approach, are also studied as readers and writers with relevant literacy experience outside of school work. Following the work of such scholars...

Public Pedagogy: Sex Education and Mass Communication in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Questioning the relationship between medium and message has long exercised media and communications theorists, but historians have devoted comparatively little attention to the issue.1 The historiography of sexology confirms this: rather than approaching the history of sexual knowledge as the communication of expertise, historians have looked to books, manuals, films, and posters simply as sources of "evidence" of that expertise; rarely has the medium itself been the object of historical inquiry. This is curious because the first half of the twentieth century saw not only the institutionalization of sex education and the popularization of sexual expertise (notably in the marital manual) but also extraordinary developments in mass communication—in the genres of journalism and broadcasting and in the variety of media technologies available for public pedagogy. In this article we extend the historiography of sex education's usual sites of analysis by looking at two signature media of the twentieth century, the mass-circulation magazine and broadcast radio. By focusing on the medium as much as the content of the message, we can begin to connect the history of mass communication with that of sex education. In analyzing twentieth-century sex education in English-speaking cultures historians have proceeded along three broad trajectories. Those on the [End Page 71] first trajectory have studied the sexual education of children and youths newly formalized through the systematic instruction of parents as sex educators.2 Those on the second have analyzed marital manuals, which do provide a wider scope for inquiry into one print medium. Usually packaged as hardcover books and intended for adult readers' private consultation, such manuals were either purchased or studied in libraries or clinics.3 Although historians have not tended to categorize the marital manual as "sex education," readers clearly sought them for enlightenment on sexual matters.4 Those on the third trajectory have concentrated on the institutional development of formalized sex instruction in educational institutions and in the military. Generally speaking, histories of formal sex education have been based on sexological books and the instructional materials of professional sex educators. Through these media information about reproduction, contraception, venereal disease, and sexual practices ("normal" and "abnormal") was transmitted to wide audiences in libraries, the military, and (with varying degrees of government support) schools and colleges. Jeffrey Moran's Teaching Sex describes the sex-education movement in the United States during the early to mid-twentieth century as an attempt to impose controls on youth, on the newly created "adolescent," through instruction delivered within medical systems or through sex educators.5 Julian Carter has declared that starting in the 1920s "mandatory state-sponsored schooling [in the United States] . . . created the possibility for sexual pedagogy on [End Page 72] a mass level."6 But how might the historiography shift if we were to approach "education" not in its narrow institutional sense but more broadly—as advice, as instruction, as communication? Asking questions about "mass" sexual pedagogy necessarily shifts the historian's focus to mass communication, to other media for expert instruction, and to new journalistic genres of popular pedagogy, all of which functioned outside of educational, military, or religious institutions. Extending the recent historiographical move toward the epistemology of sex education—to how rather than what sex knowledge was offered and obtained7 —we suggest here that the medium as well as the content and context of the sex message calls for critical analysis. Our approach builds on work that traces important distinctions among the genres of sexual texts. Lesley Hall, for example, has examined the significance of issues like cost, binding, and foreign language quotation in medical books. These factors largely determined the reception of sex books as either learned, authoritative, and therefore respectable or popular, too easily accessible, and therefore obscene. As Hall notes, the expense and limited circulation of the earliest editions of Havelock...

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Golf Balls

Golf became part of the American landscape in the 1920s, both literally and figuratively. Many factors contributed to the tremendous growth of the game, including urbanization and increased leisure time. This article shows how national, mass-circulation magazines also contributed to that growth. How media frame an issue influences how the public perceives it, and that influences public opinion. A frame analysis of 250 magazine articles from thirty-five magazines revealed four frames: game enhancement, benefits, mythical nature of golf, and Bobby Jones adulation. These frames all helped promote the acceptance of golf and increased participation in it. Thus, magazines, which were one of the true mass media of the decade, contributed to the sport's growth by the way they framed it.

Henry E. Sigerist: medical historian and social visionary.

FOR CLOSE TO 3 DECADES in the first half of the 20th century, Henry E. Sigerist was widely admired as the world’s leading historian of medicine.1 Born in Paris of Swiss parents, young Henry grew up in Paris and Zurich; he then studied philology at the University of Zurich and oriental languages at University College and Kings College, London. He returned to Zurich to complete a medical degree and served as a medical officer in the Swiss army. Having decided that he wished to study the history of medicine, and having the financial means to live as an independent scholar, Sigerist went to Leipzig, Germany, to study under Karl Sudhoff, director of the University of Leipzig’s pioneering Institute of the History of Medicine. Sigerist taught the history of medicine at the University of Zurich until 1925, when, at the precocious age of 34, he succeeded Sudhoff as director of the Leipzig Institute. In 1932, Sigerist moved to the United States to succeed William Henry Welch as director of the Johns Hopkins University Institute of the History of Medicine, which had recently been created on the Leipzig model. Sigerist brought to Johns Hopkins the high standards of German scholarship and transformed the institute into a national center for the history of medicine in the United States. He reorganized the American Association for the History of Medicine and began publishing a major scholarly journal, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. He also played an important public role. An urbane and eloquent lecturer, he enjoyed celebrity status at medical society meetings, before civic organizations and women’s clubs, in colleges and universities, and at intellectual forums and student conventions. Sigerist was a prolific writer. His first books published in English, The Great Doctors and his admiring account of American Medicine, were received with general enthusiasm.2,3 But Sigerist’s political views were being honed by his observations of the American capitalist system in the throes of economic crisis, his anguished awareness of the rise of German fascism, and his optimistic belief in the future of socialism. His 1937 book, Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union, created a sensation.4 Sigerist portrayed the radically transformed health care system of the Soviet Union as a model for public health and medical care worldwide, the final stage in a long historical evolution of health care organization. The book was widely read, being both criticized and admired. Sigerist now emerged as a major spokesman for “compulsory health insurance” and was much sought after as a lecturer, popular author, and radio commentator. He published articles in mass circulation magazines and left-leaning journals. When Time magazine published his portrait on its cover in January 1939, it described him as both the world’s greatest medical historian and the nation’s most widely respected authority on compulsory health insurance and health policy.5 But in the 1940s, Sigerist’s welcome in America began to turn sour. He was attacked by the American Medical Association, criticized by Hopkins medical alumni, and declared unfit for government service. Tired and under severe strain, he struggled to continue writing his long-promised and recently begun multivolume History of Medicine.6,7 In 1947, with continuing financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, he left the United States and retired to Switzerland, where he died in 1957. As Sigerist was preparing to leave the United States, Alan Gregg of the Rockefeller Foundation eloquently described his contribution at a dinner held in his honor: Beyond and above anyone else Henry Sigerist made us aware of the fact that medicine is the study and application of biology in a matrix that is at once historical, social, political, economic, and cultural. . . . Sir Oliver Lodge once remarked that the last thing in the world that a deep sea fish could discover would be salt water. Henry Sigerist removed us, with a historian’s landing net, from a circumambient present into the atmosphere of the past and thus discovered to us the milieu in which we were swimming, floating, and betimes stagnating.8

The girl on the magazine cover: the origins of visual stereotypes in American mass media

Kitch, Carolyn. The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in Mass Media. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 252 pp. $18.95. In The Girl an the Magazine Cover, Carolyn Kitch surveys turn-of-the-twentieth-century origins of stereotypes of women found in magazines of the 1990s, which were evidencing the pattern of backlash to the women's movement described by Susan Faludi. What she finds is not surprising. Like the editorial and business formulae underlying today's magazines, according to Kitch, current stereotypes of women developed when the modem magazine emerged between 1890 and 1930. These were years of dynamic industrial, technological, financial, and geographical growth and consolidation; of threatening immigration, unionization, and radicalism; and of U.S. transformation into a world military, colonial, and industrial power. Traditional Anglophile definitions of an American man or woman and gender roles were under siege. Magazine illustrators offered new standards-especially for the who was emerging from the rigidity of the Victorian Woman. Kitch's iconographic analyses of illustrations from the first mass-circulation magazines are this study's strength. She identifies the transition from True Woman to New Woman in six 1897 illustrations by Alice Barber Stephens in Ladies'Home Journal. In these illustrations, women were placed in the home; but they also appeared, especially younger women, in the world of commerce, both as consumers and workingwomen. In either setting, her women appeared realistic. This contrasts with the New Woman created by Charles Dana Gibson, an idealized type who appeared repeatedly on the covers of the largest circulation magazines during the first decade of the twentieth century. The Gibson Girl-young, genteel, Anglo-Saxon, self-assured, coifed, and statuesque-dominated culture, moving from magazine covers to wallpaper, china, and framed illustrations. Gibson also presented his New Woman as dominating and tormenting little men caught in a bureaucratized society. As the second decade arrived, Harrison Fisher and Howard Chandler Christy drew their New Woman as upper-class as had Gibson, but their feminine ideal now incorporated college attendance and outdoor recreations; they were more approachable, more sexually open, and more like pals on outings with their college-educated beaus. At the same time, a New Woman, more dangerous to the males' character than the Gibson Girl, appeared in the illustrations of James Montgomery Flagg and Coles Phillips in Life and Judge, humor magazines aimed at upwardly mobile males. …