St. Nicholas Magazine "View From the ‘Pleasure Ground’: American
Children’s Magazines 1820-1905” This Media and Communications
research seminar given in the fall of 2004 focused on the way
children’s magazines in the nineteenth century presented the
world-- and their roles in it-- to an important dual audience of
children and adults. The history of periodicals, like book
history, needs to be approached from a variety of perspectives
and considered as a significant part of the larger history of
human communication, so the work of the course combined methods
and insights derived from cultural studies, American studies,
children’s studies, and literary criticism, as well as media and
communication studies. Periodicals are only created through
collaborative effort, and their study requires a kind of
collaborative scholarship. Much of the work of this seminar
involved sharing our hands-on research into primary materials.
Some of the articles, stories, advertisements, and graphics
examined by members of the class h