adminI’ve been trying to learn more about Harper publications since 2016, when I first encountered Harper’s Monthly and Harper’s Weekly for my joint senior thesis in English and History at the University of Denver. I began by trying to understand the founding of Harper’s Weekly in 1857–an attempt at establishing one of the first national periodicals at the height of the Sectional Crisis. Following the periodical’s delicate rhetoric through the Civil War proved more fascinating still.
I couldn’t answer everything I wanted to about the periodicals in just the few months my thesis allowed, so I decided to continue my pursuit as a graduate student in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. My master’s thesis, completed during the fateful spring of 2020, focused on Harper’s Weekly during the earliest days of Reconstruction.
Today, I am embarking on my dissertation, still focused on–you guessed it–Harper’s Weekly. This time, I feel I finally have the time and resources to consider the full Harper’s Weekly run, from 1857 to 1916. I hope my research can show the effects that the dominance of Harper’s Weekly throughout the mid-nineteenth century had both on its contemporary publication sphere and our archives today.
I decided to start this site to share some of the data, discoveries, and discussions that I can’t fit into my dissertation in their full form. Feel free to click through my blog posts to follow along with my writing and research, and visit the resources on other parts of the site to see the tidbits that might speak to your own curiosity about Harper publications!
