Reflections from the Beginning

Acknowledging that American Periodicals is celebrating twenty-five years causes me to reflect back through my career, since the beginning of the journal and RSAP coincide exactly with my beginning as an academic. When I began as a full-time graduate student in the summer of 1990 at the University of North Texas, little did I know that I would have the opportunity to serve as Dr. James T. F. Tanner’s graduate assistant and as the founding managing editor of American Periodicals. I would come to have a significant, or at least an important and functional, role in the founding of the organization and the journal that has become the preferred home for scholars of American periodical literature, now for a quarter of a century.

In those early days, I felt somewhat like Melville’s sub-sub-librarian, belonging “to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm” (that is, a graduate student), in my little workstation in the back of Jim Tanner’s office. Even then, however, I knew that we were doing important and meaningful work. I knew that I had been chosen to be part of something valuable. Jim’s passion for this work inspired me, and I looked forward eagerly to the next task that I was assigned. I do not remember counting hours or punching clocks. I did not feel like hired help. I was afforded an opportunity to participate in the real world of scholarship as a partner. I am still so grateful today for the opportunity.

Trying to get a community together in those days was not easy. Now it is a matter of setting up a Facebook page. No Web. No email. I spent days and days, even weeks and weeks, typing department addresses from the MLA Directory and sending letters, asking chairs to forward them to potentially interested faculty. We have a new society! We have a new journal! Get involved! We received letters and phone calls, and we (or at least Jim) hit the pavement, getting a ragtag core of folks together who had an interest in starting something like the Brits’ RSVP. Jim’s contacts, colleagues, and compatriots, like Sam Riley, Larry Berkove, Ezra Greenspan, Kenneth Price, and Bob Scholnick, were instrumental in becoming a core of scholars willing to write articles or review books for this emerging journal.

As I look over that first issue in 1991, I see names and titles, and I feel nostalgic about sitting in that long, narrow office looking at hard-copy manuscripts, typing in text, and reading and re-reading copy, alone and aloud with Jim; about corresponding with the authors, by mail and phone; and about seeing that first issue take shape before my eyes. There was Janice Simon’s article on nineteenth-century periodical covers, Cheryl Bohde’s piece on ideology, and Patricia Marks’s article on theatre. These—along with Larry’s piece on the American canon, Scholnick’s article on Scribner’s Monthly after the war, Price’s piece on Whitman, and Roger Tarr’s work on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings—rounded out that first issue and demonstrated the range and depth of material ready to be mined from American periodical literature. Sam Riley’s bibliography provided a valuable resource that would continue for some time.

Learning so much every day about the wealth of early periodicals on women’s issues and politics, seeing the culture come alive in the pages of well-known magazines such as Scribner’s, being introduced to magazines and newspapers of which I had never heard, and being a close witness to this kind of sophisticated scholarship using primary sources helped me as a new PhD graduate student understand what an academic culture was all about. I got to see how the sausage was made, and it was fascinating. For the first time, I got to know the people behind the pages, and meeting them showed me that I could also enter this world that before had been a mystery.

During my three years of full-time doctoral work, I continued to work each day in the American...