Someone could go a long way toward telling the story of my life through its magazines: the Highlights my parents gave me, determined that my small self should be as entertained and enlightened as possible; my grandparents’ neatly collected Readers’ Digests, which I eagerly read until learning my freshman year in college that they were hopelessly bourgeois; the New Yorkers I loved and displayed in my graduate student apartment, the Vanity Fairs I loved and hid under the bed. Magazines tell the story of who I was supposed to be and who I wanted to be. Or perhaps they don't; how much of what the magazines meant to me is visible in the historical record? I didn't purchase all that I read, after all, nor did I read all that I purchased. A magazine I loved one year might embarrass me the next, and then find its way back into favor, my subscription all the while remaining unchanged. Magazines, in short, are both perplexing and promising subjects of analysis, with the question of how they create communities of readers posing perhaps the most promising and perplexing question of all.
Heather Haveman takes up that question in her provocative and useful Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860. Haveman is “interested in how media like magazines make it possible to build translocal communities” (p. 1). Such communities, she argues, united people on the basis of interest despite geographic dispersion. They allowed for religious denominations to coordinate activities and compete for believers, for social reform movements to gather members and effect change, and for those in “specialized occupations” to “meet and learn from each other to improve their practices” (p. 277). The communities that formed were “simultaneously modern and antimodern,” she explains, meaning that they were both rationally oriented to achieve goals and capable of creating a “shared feeling of belongingness” (p. 271). By demonstrating to Americans that it was possible to create simultaneous, translocal communities of interest, whether occupational or affective, magazines also helped to create “the pluralistic integration that was central to American public culture in this era” (p. 270).
Haveman, a professor of sociology and business, advances her arguments in eight chapters. Her introduction cogently explains that the magazine business “offers great insight into the creation and entrenchment of formal organizations in American society as it moved from a traditional social order to a more modern one” (p. 7). She also lays out the impressive evidence collection, sorting, and analysis that underlie her arguments. She and research associates gathered data on 5,362 magazines published between 1741 and 1860. In six subsequent chapters, Haveman relates the transformation of magazines from fragile, short-lived publications to periodicals that might last for decades and draw thousands or even tens of thousands of readers. Whereas in the early years of her study, magazine founders tended to be in “the publishing trades,” “writers,” or from “the traditional learned professions,” what she calls “magazine entrepreneurship” had by the end of the period “spread beyond industry insiders and socioeconomic elites” (p. 121). Magazines were increasingly important in competition among religious denominations, and they also helped to shape social reform, as those involved began to create “federated organizations that made possible coordinated action across the nation” (p. 195). Haveman finds more than three hundred magazines devoted to reforms including temperance, women's rights, and slavery. Six of these had circulations that exceeded twenty thousand, and even those with smaller circulations “provided antidotes to far-flung reformers’ geographic isolation and disseminated information widely” (p. 205). The ongoing nature of magazines also allowed for the creation of persistent, meaningful connection between readers and magazines and among readers. Magazines not only aided reform causes, Haveman writes, but benefited from the reform movements, which provided the material, imagery, and emotional resonance that spurred subscriptions. Haveman's final substantive chapter is titled “The Economy.” It offers an extended account of urbanization, westward expansion, and industrialization, after which Haveman explains the importance of banknote reporters—which allowed Americans to do business amid the extraordinary number of circulating notes—and agricultural and trade magazines.
This is a book far more interested in substance than style. Chapters read as freestanding essays, with the same information repeated across them, and although Haveman occasionally quotes from magazines to illustrate her arguments, the book as a whole bears little of the liveliness and color of the periodicals it studies; one paragraph consists almost entirely of the titles of thirty-odd magazines devoted to agriculture (p. 257). But despite its dryness, the book is a wellspring of argument and information. Haveman's data collection offers robust empirical evidence for a number of things historians have tended to assume, such as that magazine founders became more diverse and magazines became less fragile over time. Her detailed discussion of where magazines were published bears considerable fruit, not least the observation that magazines both celebrated the local and created translocal communities. Her extensive discussion of religious magazines firmly and correctly places them at the center of any story of print culture and modernization. In short, anyone thinking of making a claim about magazines will want to consult Haveman's charts and tables, and anyone thinking of beginning a line of inquiry should do the same.
To consult a book is not necessarily to read it cover to cover, however, and I think many historians will do more of the former than the latter. The reasons for that stem from the benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary scholarship: authors who cross into new territory tend to bring with them skills and perspectives the disciplinary natives don't possess; at the same time, the migrants don't know and don't always familiarize themselves with the landscape into which they've arrived. The resulting scholarship can feel both innovative and slightly off-kilter, and that is the case with Magazines and the Making of America.
Because Haveman assumes her readers have little familiarity with the period she discusses, she offers cogent synopses of such things as westward expansion, urbanization, and differences among Christian denominations’ views of social reform. It will be wonderful if this approach draws new eyes to the period, allowing organizational sociologists and other scholars outside the field of history the information they need to develop and pursue research questions. Sometimes, though, Haveman seems to offer too little information to orient nonhistorians, but enough to leave historians impatient. As one example, her broad account of the nation's modernizing economy would seem the backdrop for all of what she describes, but she saves it for the last chapter. Its content will feel familiar and pedantic to historians, while those not familiar with the period will find it comes too late in the book to help them.
It is data collection and analysis, not historical narrative, that lies at the heart of this book, and that too shows both the costs and benefits of Haveman's approach. She writes, for example, that she made an extra effort—what she calls an “‘affirmative action’ approach”—to find magazines that she deems “least likely to be tracked by historians: (a) short-lived and small-circulation magazines; (b) publications from the hinterlands (the West and the South); (c) magazines in languages other than English”; (d) publications that don't cover literary, religious, medical, scientific, or political topics; and (e) “magazines for subordinated groups: women, children, students, blacks, and Native Americans” (p. 280). As marvelous as it is to have this collecting work done, Haveman's categories are jarring. Few if any historians would recognize “the South” as “the hinterlands,” nor accept the existence of a meaningfully unified South or West. Historians have also shown a great deal of interest in magazines intended for “subordinated groups”: as just one example, Godey's Ladies’ Book has been the subject of research among historians for decades. There are other similar moments. “I sought to compile state-level time-series data on the number of members of adherents of all religious groups in America from 1740 to 1860,” Haveman writes in an appendix (p. 294). “Unfortunately such data proved to be unavailable” (p. 294). It unquestionably did. Nothing about the experience of religious life across that century and nothing about the reality of archive work suggests such data would be available, and any historian of the era would have known that to be the case. On the other hand, Haveman's skilled and optimistic data collection has produced and organized data in ways that those world-weary historians never did.
If Haveman's traveler's eye has mixed results in terms of her presentation of data, its effects on her major arguments are more generally negative. She pays little attention to politics, despite the fact that political parties are just the sort of simultaneously local and translocal organization in which she's interested. National conferences of reformers receive similarly short shrift. Haveman also simply doesn't engage with much of the work done on print culture in the last twenty years, including the multivolume History of the Book in America (1999–2009), which despite its name includes essays exploring periodicals, as well as a great deal of discussion of the conditions of print and its transportation, subjects in which Haveman is deeply interested. Also absent from her reading are a number of historical studies that portray periodicals as an important instrument of Habermasian civil society. Declining to put her work in conversation with both historians of the book and historians of the public sphere, Haveman too often seems to have embarked on a kind of parallel invention, arriving by separate methods at a conclusion—that magazines helped to create communities linking Americans in new and influential ways during a period of political and economic transformation—that historians have long since reached.
Historians and scholars of print culture will thus find that their knowledge and expertise renders them impatient with some aspects of Haveman's book. It is also the case that Haveman's own expertise can be alienating to those more comfortable with words than with numbers. Haveman uses statistical analysis in a way that most historians have, since the fading of quantitative history, been happy to ignore. That in combination with her blind spots about swathes of recent scholarship might make it easy for historians to respectfully set aside this work. They should resist the temptation. Haveman's book is rich in information and argument about things historians care about, and it shows the usefulness of statistical methods in evaluating correlations and causations—two things central to the work of all historians. At the same time, Haveman's work would benefit from the careful attention of historians who could, if they pay close attention, question the weight she believes such methods can bear: her insistence that it is possible through use of the instrumental-variable technique to determine the extent to which magazines caused antislavery reform, for example, cries out for discussion with historians familiar with the many contexts in which such reform occurred. It seems likely that despite Haveman's confidence, no single equation can settle the question; on the other hand, without quantitative evidence and equations, some questions will go unasked and some conclusions unchallenged. Finally, it's striking that understanding her explanations of method requires far more than a basic grasp of statistics—indeed, it requires a level of quantitative literacy few humanists seem likely to possess. If arguments about history fall into a profession in which few can read them, do they make a sound? Should they?
Haveman's work is a significant contribution to the study of American magazines, one whose weaknesses emerge from the same interdisciplinary ambition and reach that produce its considerable strengths. It will be of interest to those who study organizations, early America, and print culture, and it should provoke thought about how we as scholars reach our conclusions and to whom and how we offer them.
