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Julia Guarneri's book considers turn-of-the-century newspapers in New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Chicago not just as vessels of information but as active agents in the creation of cities and of urban culture. Guarneri argues that newspapers sparked cultural, social, and economic shifts that transformed a rural republic into a nation of cities, and that transformed rural people into self-identified metropolitans and moderns. The book pays closest attention to the content and impact of "feature news," such as advice columns, neighborhood tours, women's pages, comic strips, and Sunday magazines. While papers provided a guide to individual upward mobility, they also fostered a climate of civic concern and responsibility. Editors drew in new reading audiences--women, immigrants, and working-class readers--giving rise to the diverse, contentious, and commercial public sphere of the twentieth century.
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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 ...
Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Originally published in 1998. Drawing on both documentary and pictorial evidence, Pamela Walker Laird explores the modernization of American advertising to 1920. She links its rise and transformation to changes that affected American society and business alike, including the rise of professional specialization and the communications revolution that new technologies made possible. Laird finds a fundamental shift in the kinds of people who created advertisements and their relationships to the firms that advertised. Advertising evolved from the work of informing customers (telling people what manufacturers had to sell) to creating consumers (persuading people that they needed to buy). Through this story, Laird shows how and why—in the intense competitions for both markets and cultural authority—the creators of advertisements laid claim to "progress" and used it to legitimate their places in American business and culture.