Welcome
- Welcome
When American Periodicals (AP) moved from the University of North Texas to the Ohio State University for its thirteenth number in 2003, a team of editors assembled itself to build on the legacy of James T. F. Tanner. Susan Williams, Steven Fink, and Jared Gardner were rightly awed by his achievement in beginning a journal devoted to the scholarly study of magazines and newspapers in the United States; as three new editors undertake the next stage in the development of AP, they too stand in admiration of those colleagues who have come before them. The journal has continued to prosper in the midst of a burgeoning interest in periodical studies, and the work done in Columbus by a growing team of collaborators has positioned AP at the heart of this field. By taking advantage of innovations in digital dissemination, the Ohio State University Press first helped American Periodicals realize its distinctive visual identity on the printed page and then made the journal available to more readers than at any time in its history. The new editors are thrilled that our relationship with the Press will continue uninterrupted.
We are Karen Roggenkamp (Texas A&M, Commerce), Cynthia Patterson (University of South Florida Polytechnic), and Craig Monk (University of Lethbridge). While the 2,800 miles that separate us will offer a challenge that we cannot neglect, we are strengthened by a spirit of cooperation and heartened by the familiarity of shared interests. Amongst us, we cover the temporal range of periodical studies in the United States, and we have strengths in the study of both magazines and newspapers. We are each interested in the influence of American periodicals abroad, and all three editors have spent time thinking about how new technologies are changing the objects of our scholarship and the methods by which we share our findings with others.
Your new editors have profited from the vibrant community represented by the Research Society for American Periodicals (RSAP), and we see AP continuing its crucial role in the growth and further extension of that community. We hope that, through the journal, you will get to know better the officers of the RSAP and the other scholars from around the world who will assist us in its production. Researchers who make submissions to the journal will be welcomed into this family, and new colleagues whose voices emerge on the pages of American Periodicals will be invited back to offer reviews of books and to evaluate future manuscripts. We will continue to seek new opportunities for collaboration and encourage proposals for guest editors to undertake themed numbers. The editors hope that scholars and students alike will look [End Page v] to AP for what is new in periodical studies and, to this end, we plan to help develop further the electronic resources that have developed around the RSAP.
We will strengthen the journal so that it appears three times a year, always filled with the kind of scholarship that demonstrates the range and depth of approaches to periodical studies. We believe that the many topics that interest scholars of magazines and newspapers will further strengthen our work. We are proud of the contents of 21.1, a number that highlights this diversity of interests. In "'Their Faces Were Like So Many of the Same Sort at Home': American Responses to the Indian Rebellion of 1857," Nikhil Bilwakesh provides analysis of the coverage in the United States of foreign insurrection during the nineteenth century. By moving beyond the representation of the "Indian Mutiny" in the New York Times, Bilwakesh discovers in regional periodicals coverage that reflected domestic concerns, though many of those concerns were rooted in anxieties felt about slavery in the American south. While the American media cannot claim to have influenced events in India itself, Bilwakesh's work demonstrates, by examining the response of Irish nationals in New York, for example, the growing international relevance of newspapers and magazines in the United States. Helen Langa's "'At Least Half the Pages Will Consist of Pictures': New Masses and Politicized Visual Art" traces the use of illustrations in the radical magazine during the 1930s. Langa discovers that the tensions felt amongst members of an...
