Vigo County Historical Society

Magazines allow us to turn pages of history

Fact, fiction or feature--readers can find them all in magazines.

The first magazine published in America was the American Magazine. It was a monthly view of the political state of the British colonies. It was published in Philadelphia in 1741 and lasted three months.

Mathew Carey started two early American magazines, the Columbian in 1786 and the American Museum in 1787.

In 1830, Louis A. Godey founded Godey’s Lady’s Book. It was the first American magazine for women. Sarah Josepha Hale edited the magazine, which helped shape the tastes of thousands of women.

Among the first influential, intellectual magazines was The Dial, published in the early 18840s.

In the mid-1800s, Frank Leslie published Leslie’s Weekly, the first magazine to feature illustrations.

The Atlantic Monthly, launched in 1857, was first edited by the famous poet, James Russell Lowell

During the Civil War, many people read Harper’s Weekly for its drawings of the battlefronts.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, reformers who exposed conditions in business, industry and politics wrote for McClures and Everybody’s magazines. These writers, called "muckrakers," included Ray Baker, Lincoln Steffens and Ida M. Tarbell.

The Nation, founded in 1865 as a newspaper, became a magazine.

The Ladies Home Journal founded in 1883, worked for social causes under editor Edward W. Bok.

Other important literary publications started in the early 1900s were Vanity Fair, 1914; the New Yorker, 1925; and The Saturday Evening Post.

Editors such as Henry Luce (Life, Time, Fortune) had a major impact in shaping magazines.

The magazines pictures here are in the Vigo County Historical Museum.