Thursday, May 25, 2017

Lucie following Sidney

Lucie? Dr. Frank's sister, Lucie M. Gardner.

Sidney? Need you ask? Sidney Perley, the long-time editor of the Essex Antiquarian. He published the magazine from 1897 to 1909.

We are working on the next issue of The Gardner Annals. Last time, we looked at the Table of Contents for Volumes I through V of The Massachusetts Magazine (TMM). Also, we featured a bit about R.A. Douglas-Lithgow who provided several articles to Dr. Frank's effort.

This time, we will look at the Table of Contents for Volumes VI through XI. We also will feature a few things from those times.

After that, we will bring out lots of topics, especially those that are apropos to today.

This image is from Vol II. Sidney quit publishing. He mentioned Dr. Frank's periodical. Lucie picked up and published several articles on "Family Genealogies."


Anyone wishing contribute an article, please contact us at jmswtlk@tgsoc.org. 

What I have seen by looking thoroughly at Volumes I through V is that the initial thrust with many authors settles into a few authors providing the material (while working like mad). Several factors went into the demise of TMM. One had to do with the age of the authors. Then, WWI came along. We will show a graphic from a survey done in 1914.

Remarks: Modified: 10/28/2019 

06/14/2017 -- Sidney last published Oct 1909. The next issue of The Massachusetts Magazine had the first continuation by Lucie.

06/02/2019 -- Profile of Sidney on WikiTree.

10/28/2019 -- Mentioned Lucie in a comment at this post: Seeking refuge in the valley.

Friday, May 5, 2017

Lyceum

On this day in 1857, some folks in Boston got together to start a magazine. It was named after the great pond twixt here and the old country. And, it is still publishing (from DC having moved there from Boston in 2006). And so, we continue our interests in old magazines. As well as looking at The Massachusetts Magazine, we will consider several that were prior.

However, while looking at one of the authors of the Southern Literary Messenger, namely Lydia Sigourney, we came across the story of the Lyceum movement that started in New England as a response to efforts in Britain and the Continent. After the New England start, it rolled across the country. Lydia, of New England of course, inspired several local Lyceum chapters in several western states. We will be getting back to her.

In the meantime, that educational movement seems to have some applicability to our current state of affairs. Notice this from the history by Anna L. Curtis (in 1906): ... for the coronation of this plain common sense of the people, and for the annunciation and for the defense of fact, of truth, of reality, of actual human experience.

Now, does that not sound like New England? And, ought not it apply to today's muddy cloud of social media?

We will be doing a series on these old articles, especially those that relate to the themes of New England's broad reach across the country.

Who said that we cannot learn from the past? Rather, we ought to ask, anything new under the sun?

Remarks: Modified: 03/07/2019

03/07/2019 -- Add this to the image index at our portal to truth

Magazines

We are going through The Massachusetts Magazine (TMM) in order to document the effort by Dr. Frank and friends. The TMM published from 1908 to 1918. When we first were researching the TMM, we encountered The New England Magazine (1886-1900) which had started as the Bay State (1884-1885, 1886-1887) monthly (edited by John McClintock who was a contributing editor for the TMM).

Then, we ran across the Southern Literary Messenger, that published from 1834 to 1864, while researching southern families with New England ties. An early editor was Edgar Allen Poe. We will look at this further as we make comparison between the periodicals.

Today, there was a message sent to all interested by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. It started publishing in 1857 and is still going strong. We have to be interested in that the magazine started in Boston and was there until just a few years ago when it moved to D.C.

Message:
    On May 5, 1857, a group of Boston Brahmins gathered for dinner at the Parker House Hotel and decided to create a new magazine, one that would make politics, literature, and the arts its chief concerns. These men, united in their opposition to slavery, their love of American writing, and their tripartite names, included such eminences as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Russell Lowell. They did not set out to exclude women from the gathering; Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was invited, but she boycotted the dinner when she learned that alcohol would be served.
    A plan for this new magazine was set. The question of a name soon arose. Oliver Wendell Holmes, another of the founders, proposed "The Atlantic," to convey the notion that an immense ocean would separate this New World journal from its cousins in the Old. A manifesto was written, one that made ambitious promises: In politics, The Atlantic would be "the organ of no party or clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea," and it would bring to the attention of the reading public the newest and most interesting American writers. The manifesto was signed by, among others, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and yes, "Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe."
    In November of 1857, the first issue of this magazine was published, and we have never stopped publishing. And since its founding, this magazine has published everyone from the aforementioned Hawthorne (who served as the magazine's Civil War correspondent) to Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman; from Robert Frost and Helen Keller to W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington; from Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf to Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath, to a raft of future presidents—Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and JFK—and on to the great writers of today, too many to even begin mentioning.
    We know that the America of today would be unrecognizable to the founders of this magazine, but my hope is that they would take quickly to today's Atlantic. They would recognize in our journalism the stringent application of intelligence and analytic rigor to the great problems of the day; the devotion to the explication of not only the American idea, but also the nature of an unsettled world; and a great love of literature and culture in all of its manifestations—"the whole domain of aesthetics," in the words of the founding manifesto. I believe that the founders would be able to locate these values in our print magazine, on our website, at our events, and in our documentaries. (I also believe that they would be confused by our Instagram account.)
    Today, on the 160th anniversary of the conception of The Atlantic, I write to thank you, our subscribers, for your support, and your devotion across the years.
Magazine? One can think of these as condensed views from a particular time. They go beyond journalism. And, in the future, these will be condensations of the ever-flowing web material. As such, they are important to history; and, there are those with genealogy as subject (NEHGR, for example - published since 1847).

Remarks: Modified: 03/07/2019

03/07/2019 -- Added an image to add this to the index at our portal to truth.