Introduction: American Periodicals and Visual Culture

America's long history of periodical literature has often included a visual element. Sometimes it was as simple as a decorative page embellishment, a political cartoon, or an advertisement picture; in other instances, increasingly so in the nineteenth century, steel and wood engravings covered complete pages of individual periodical issues, whether serving as standalone images of works of art to be enjoyed or as integral components of a story or text. By the late nineteenth century, the quantity and quality of images contributed greatly to the publishing success of the American periodical. Even newspapers made space for images, especially once photographic reproduction became commonplace. Subject specialization enhanced the growth of visual images. The rise of cover art as well as illustrated fiction and travelogues led to the employment of a diverse group of artists, some who were best known for their periodical work, others for their exhibited paintings. Of course there were a few periodicals that resisted the demand for visual embellishment, whether because of economic restraints or principle. The Nation immediately comes to mind as a magazine that withstood the increasing call for images well into the late twentieth century. Who would imagine that the most significant art journal before the Civil War, the Crayon (1855-61), would have an illustrated cover for only one year of its publication and only a handful of simple line illustrations during its entire run? An art magazine today without substantial visual matter would not be an oxymoron; rather, it just would not be. In the postmodern world of ubiquitous images of all types simultaneously bombarding the public's consciousness, the deliberate inhibitions regarding images of pre-Second World War American publications may seem puzzling and quaint.

A historical inquiry into this vexed visual culture of periodicals is a fitting topic for American Periodicals. Indeed, exactly how visual material was incorporated and its relationship to the textual contents, philosophical purposes, political agendas, cultural conceptions, even unintended implications of a specific periodical, editor, author, or artist lie at the heart of this special issue on American periodicals. From a rich group of submissions (indeed, there could have been two issues devoted to this topic easily) I chose six articles to represent the diversity of periodical types, audiences, and visual incorporations beginning with antebellum America through the Second World War. The majority of the magazines discussed in this special issue appealed to a general middle-class audience, and they are staples of general histories of American culture in the nineteenth century: Godey's Lady's Book, Peterson's Magazine, Harper's Weekly and Monthly, Collier's Weekly, and in the twentieth century, Life. In the twenties, however, the Crisis and Opportunity specifically addressed African Americans and employed many black artists and writers. The most specialized periodical discussed is the T-Square Club Journal which covered the architectural profession in the 1930s and voiced pro-modernist aesthetics in the urban landscape under the editorship of George Howe.

Visual material widely ranges from fashion plates to political cartoons, from illustrations of Henry James's Turn of the Screw to documentary photographs of Cuba during American imperialism, from the minimalist typographic modernism of T-Square's cover to the narrativeladen figures of Smith's covers for the Crisis and Opportunity, and from the advertisement of Philadelphia's modern Philadelphia Saving Fund Society Building to reproductions of great works of art every American should know. All of these examples indicate the diverse play in American periodicals between high, middling, and low media as well as the contrasts between everyday life, historical events, and the refined world of art. Karin J. Bohleke examines how American magazines like Godey's and Peterson's claimed French fashion plates as their own, making adjustments to the original as necessary for a primarily Protestant audience desiring to reaffirm ideal notions of motherhood. A century later, as Isadora A. Helfgott demonstrates, Life magazine reproduced famous paintings to culturally and morally indoctrinate ordinary Americans as to the virtues of looking at fine art, whether in museums, private collections, or the weekly magazine. David Brody relates how a single work of architecture, the PSFS building...