The 1860 census recorded a 118 percent increase in the number of newspapers printed in the United States just in the 1850s, when nearly 1 billion copies were printed under some 4,000 different titles (this was about 30 papers for every person in the country). The publication’s inaugural editor, James Russell Lowell, had launched a magazine in Boston called The Pioneer in the previous decade, promising a better publication for “the intelligent and reflecting portion of the Reading Public.” Readers would find no “thrice-diluted trash” and no “loss of time and deterioration of every moral and intellectual faculty” that comes with it. The issue includes a decidedly un-panicked reflection on the Panic of 1857; a story about a minister’s journey through a series of religious fads and enthusiasms, ending with a conversion to Catholicism; Harriet Beecher Stowe on the relationship between the outward symbols and inner experience of mourning; and poems by Emerson and Longfellow.
Author: Jake Lundberg
Published at: 2025-11-13 21:30:00
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