Revisiting the Field: American Periodicals and American Periodicals Research

To commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of American Periodicals, the editors invited me to review the journal’s impact on individuals and the field, and my backward glance includes personal history, as someone privileged to participate from the start of the publication. The Research Society for American Periodicals formed soon after I defended my dissertation, as I sought ways to engage myself fully in the academy after many years as an adjunct instructor and independent scholar. For reasons I no longer recall precisely, I signed up as a founding member, but I do remember feeling gratified to see my name listed in an early newsletter along with those of Americanists whose work I much admired. Three in particular stood out: Robert J. Scholnick, Lawrence I. Berkove, and David E. E. Sloane. Bob’s analysis of science in antebellum transatlantic magazine culture, Larry’s recovery of 1860s newspaper hoaxes by Dan DeQuille, Sam Davis, and other humorists of the western tradition that he calls the Sagebrush school, and David’s bibliographic work on comic magazines all modeled how the fuzzy borders of periodicals research could sustain an interdisciplinary research program in American literary and cultural history, even as I left the English Department of LaGuardia Community College/CUNY, which I joined as an assistant professor in 1988, to teach in the journalism and communication studies programs in what is now the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University.

Following David Sloane as book review editor for American Periodicalsin 1991 proved particularly valuable to my efforts. In those early years, RSAP drew members from journalism as well as literary and American studies. That heterogeneity, as in a periodical itself, not only helped me position my research program within and against the mainstream but also shaped my approach to teaching historical research methods to communication doctoral students. When I turned over the book review department to Patricia Okker a few years later, I had guided students through a number of periodicals projects while wading deep into two of my own, the first on science and technology in the Galaxy(1866–78) and the second on the New Yorker’s foundational years as a humor magazine (1925–30). ¹Lessons from these projects, in turn, guided my service on the editorial board for American Periodicalsand my thoughts on its editorial policies, both as a member of the RSAP advisory board and, from 2009–11, as RSAP president. As I look back on twenty-five years with AP, then, and especially at the dozen years since I articulated my suggestions for the journal in “From the Field: The Future of American Periodicalsand American Periodicals Research,” which began as an ALA conference paper as the Ohio State University editorial board of Susan Williams, Steve Fink, and Jared Gardner took the reins from James T. F. Tanner, I see how American Periodicalshas continued to expand its value and scope, even as some challenges remain. ²

Among successes large and small, I applaud both the OSU editors and their successor team of Cynthia Patterson, Karen Roggenkamp, and Craig Monk for expanding publication from one annual number to two and for their early commitment to electronic library subscriptions. Full-text bibliographic databases not only document users’ downloads and thereby prove the value that occasional readers as well as loyalists find in the journal’s contents, but also reward RSAP with royalties that advance our scholarly and educational mission now that American Periodicalshas repaid its start-up costs to OSU Press. And I’m thrilled to see that APhas revived the genre of the scholarly note in its “From the Periodical Archives” department, which I advocated long ago, as in Gary Scharnhorst’s excellent contribution to in 21, no. 2 (2011). ³But I still hope that the journal will establish an annual (or biennial) critical review of periodicals scholarship, building on the checklists that Sam Riley pioneered in the early years of American Periodicals, and I am...