Mixed Race Studies

Cultural Reconstruction: Nation, Race, and the Invention of the American Magazine, 1830-1915

University of Maryland
2003-12-19
504 pages

Reynolds J. Scott-Childress, Assistant Professor of History
New Paltz, State University of New York

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Cultural Reconstruction asks: How did the U.S. develop a national culture simultaneously unified and fractured by race? The little-examined history of American magazines offers a vital clue. The dissertation’s first part demonstrates how post-Jacksonian American culturists, deeply disturbed by the divisive partisanship of “male” politics, turned to the “female” culture of sentimentality with the hope of creating a coherent and inclusive nation. These culturists believed a nationally circulating magazine would be the medium of that culture. This belief derived from the wide success of the penny press revolution of the 1830s. Cutting against the traditional reading of the penny press, Cultural Reconstruction claims that newspapers were a major proponent of sentimentality but were barred from creating a national audience by their intense local appeal. Antebellum magazinists, from Edgar Allen Poe to James Russell Lowell, attempted to adapt the sentimental worldview of the penny press to a national audience, but were frustrated by a series of cultural rifts expressed chiefly in gendered terms. Part two of the dissertation examines how the post-Civil War magazine furthered the project of sentimentality and became the leading medium of national culture. Responding to the 1870s collapse of Political Reconstruction, editors such as Richard Watson Gilder at the Century employed a series of innovative aesthetic strategiesgreater realism, local color, and regional dialect believing they were creating a cultural panorama of American life. But this project of reconstruction was riven by two fundamentally conflicting visions of American identity: the regional versus the racial. The dissertation explores correspondence between Northern magazinists and white and black Southern authors (George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Thomas Nelson Page) to reveal how race won out: Northern editors helped invent and popularize “Southern” memories of the Old South and the Civil War. In the process, the magazines nationalized white Southern conceptions of racial separation and prepared the way for the explosive nationwide reaction to the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Cultural Reconstruction shows how twentieth-century American national unity was paradoxically bound up in racial division.

Table of Contents

• Introduction. Forgetting the Magazine: The Birth of a National Culture
• Part I The Rise of Sentimental Public Culture
  • 1. The Fall of the Millennial Nation: The Failure of the Atlantic Cable and the Coming of the Civil War
  • 2. Printing Urban Society: The Social Imagination and the Rise of the Daily Newspaper
  • 3. The Whole Tendency of the Age Is Magazineward: The Post-Jacksonian Magazine and National Culture
• Part II Cultural Reconstruction: The American Magazine
  • 4. Competing for Culture: The Rise of the General Magazine
  • 5. The Evolution of Magazine Culture: Sentimentality, Class, and the Editors of Scribner’s:
  • 6. The Genre of Sentimental Realism: The Thematics, Stylistics, and Form of the Postbellum Magazine
  • 7. Cultural Reconstruction: National Unity and Racial Division in the American Magazine
  • 8. From Local Color to Racial Color: The Century and African American Authors
  • 9. A Hazard of New Cultures
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.