Magazines

Magazines. The first American magazines, Andrew Bradford's American Magazine and Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine, appeared in 1741, but neither lasted the year.Magazines remained shaky ventures for the next century and a half, low in income, circulation, advertising, and life span. Conditions improved with the Postal Mailing Act of 1879, which lowered mailing rates for periodicals. Between 1865 and 1885 the number of U.S. periodicals increased fourfold, from 700 to 3,300.

This boom in magazine founding was also fostered by the invention of the rotary press, which allowed for halftone (instead of hand‐engraved) illustrations; faster delivery through railroads and rural free delivery postal routes; businesses seeking national markets; and the shift from bulk to packaged merchandise, leading in turn to brand names and advertising campaigns.

Cyrus and Louisa Knapp Curtis of Philadelphia, two of the many Gilded Age businesspeople to take advantage of these conditions, in 1883 launched the Ladies Home Journal. The Curtises' son‐in‐law Edward Bok (1863–1930) edited it from 1889 to 1919. The Journal was the prototype of the modern national magazine, with its combination of low subscription price, heavy advertising content (30 percent of the first issue), audience segmented by gender, and direct and indirect understandings of gender throughout. Building the Journal's circulation to over a million by the turn of the century, the Curtises in 1897 first published a magazine for men. The Saturday Evening Post was masterfully edited by George Horace Lorimer (1868–1937), but not until the formula was broadened to include the family did it hit its stride. In the Progressive Era, McClure's and other muckraking magazines helped build sentiment for reform.

In 1922, Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden created Time magazine, targeting men primarily, but intending to condense and simplify for all educated Americans the proliferation of news in print. Hadden died in 1929, but the Luce/Hadden company, Time Inc., had already created Fortune magazine and would go on to create highly successful periodicals like Life, Sports Illustrated, and Architectural Digest. These magazines eventually gave rise to a host of imitators, including Newsweek, U.S. News, Look, and Jet.

Gender and race combined to shape the magazine market after Luce as demonstrated by the vicissitudes of periodicals intended for African‐American readers. Some founders of magazines for blacks, like W.E.B. Du Bois, eschewed advertising and tried to foster serious political debate. His magazine, The Call, did not thrive, however, often teetering on the brink of financial disaster. In contrast, publisher John H. Johnson won black readers with magazine formulae already popular with whites. His Negro Digest (1942) did so well that he created several other magazines, including Ebony (1945). Like the Saturday Evening Post, Ebony originally targeted men but broadened its formula to include women as well, to attract more advertising.

Popular magazines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reflected and reinforced a culture divided by gender, race and ethnicity, and social class—stubbornly persistent divisions thoroughly entwined with capitalism and consumption. Magazines helped set the stage for future forms of popular culture in the United States, such as radio, movies, and television.

With the rise of television in the 1950s, many mass‐market, general‐interest magazines ceased publication. Special‐interest and niche magazines continued to proliferate, however. The 1990s brought experiments with publishing magazines on the Internet, including a political magazine called Slate, owned by the Microsoft Corporation.
See also Journalism; Muckrakers; Printing and Publishing.

Bibliography

Frank Luther Mott , A History of American Magazines, 5 vols., 1958–1968.
A. J. van Zuilen , The Life Cycle of Magazines: A Historical Study of the Decline and Fall of the General Interest Mass Audience Magazine in the United States During the Period 1946–1972, 1977.
Jan Cohn , Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post, 1989.
Alan Nourie and Barbara Nourie, eds., American Mass‐Market Magazines, 1990.
Helen Damon‐Moore , Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1994.

Helen Damon‐Moore