Magazines Move West

Source

The Kentucky Experience . Magazine publishing in America began in the East, especially in cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, where educational institutions and communities of scholars, journalists, and readers could support both general and specialized periodicals. As Americans moved west, building towns and cities, establishing schools and churches, they began to reproduce in the West some of the culture of the East. Once presses, paper, and type were available in the West, a variety of periodicals sprang up. One of the first was Medley, or Monthly Miscellany, a twenty-page monthly that lasted throughout 1803 in Lexington, Kentucky. In fact, Lexington became an early publishing center in the West, largely because of Transylvania University, a school that attracted several scholarly writers to its faculty. Another important Lexington-based magazine was the Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine, a monthly started in 1819 by a New Englander named William Gibbes Hunt. Hunt called on Horace Holley, president of Transylvania, to write articles for the magazine. Another professor, Constantine S. Rafmesque, wrote articles on Kentucky botany and the fishes of the Ohio River. Hunt also published poetry, book reviews, political articles, and a series of stories about conflicts between whites and Indians. The Western Review ceased publication in June 1821 after several of its contributors died. Hunt launched another magazine almost immediately, the Masonic Miscellany and Ladies’ Literary Magazine, which lasted until 1823.

Cincinnati’s Western Monthly Review. Cincinnati was another early center of Western intellectual and publishing activity. By 1825 Ohio was home to various schools and colleges, two paper mills, a type foundry, and Cincinnati’s own extensive printing industry. One of the city’s most significant periodicals was the Western Monthly Review, founded in 1827. Its first issue reviewed the growth of intellectual and cultural life in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. Editor Timothy Flint, a Harvard-educated Congregational minister, praised Lexington, Memphis, Natchez, and New Orleans for “their distinguished literary circles.” Flint was convinced that Western scholars were in every way equal to their Eastern kin. “In fact,” Flint wrote, “there is nothing deep in science, or polished in literature, or pretending in learning, or long-winded in oratory, or full even to bursting in the inspiration of the muse, in the Atlantic country, which may not be found in the West.” The Western Monthly published satire, criticism, translations of French and Spanish poetry, religious articles, and fiction. Flint was an energetic writer, supplying much of the content himself. Flint’s praise of Western writers continued throughout the life of the magazine, prompting the New York Evening Chronicle to label him “the donkey of Cincinnati.” The magazine attained a circulation of one thousand readers early in its existence but foundered because of delinquent subscribers. The last issue appeared in June 1830.

Source

Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939).