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Harper Brothers publishing house in New York set the standard for illustrated magazines with the inauguration of its very popular Harper’s Monthly Magazine in1850, a staid literary magazine aimed at a broad but genteel reading public. This…

Harper’s Weekly became such a mainstay of popular news culture during the Civil War, that the newspaper could make references to its own popularity within its illustrations. Copies of Harper’s are among the presents Santa Claus is…

As the war progressed, Harper’s Weekly changed from toeing the middle political (or even apolitical) ground to a more outright Union stance. This was also the case for its attitude toward African Americans. By 1863, especially after the…

Before the Civil War, Southerners were also consuming the popular Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. After the commencement of the war, however, readers in the Confederate states were cut off from these papers. In…

The most famous African American in antebellum America was Frederick Douglass (ca. 1818-95), an escaped slave from Maryland who achieved renown in the North as an antislavery lecturer and writer. Douglass began his abolitionist career in league with…

Although the repeal of the Stamp Act led many to briefly believe the Crown would leave the colonies alone, the institution of the Townshend Acts in 1767 erased that hope. The colonists’ resistance to these acts led to the establishment of…