Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, June 1850

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
840K words
Chapters
84

Tags

English Originals Literature Social ObservationHumanistic CareDaily ReflectionsIntellectual CommentaryMagazine SelectionBeautiful EssaysPopular NarrativeEclectic ReadingVictorian EraCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 1. No 1, June 1850 by VariousAuthor: Various,Language: English, Class: AP: General Works: Periodicals, Release Date: Mar 19, 2012

Editor's review

This is an electronic reprint of the inaugural June 1850 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine. As the starting point of a mid-nineteenth-century American general-interest periodical, it holds irreplaceable documentary value. Its contents span current-affairs commentary, literary essays, book reviews, and practical information, presenting the public reading tastes and modes of discourse of the mid-Victorian era. For readers studying American publishing history, periodical history, and nineteenth-century Anglo-American cultural exchange, it is a primary source that can be cited directly. It is best read as a historical slice: one can observe how early editors arranged sections and solicited contributions, and sense what topics concerned readers of the time. Being the inaugural issue, it lacks the settled section structure of later volumes and is closer to a publication that must introduce itself, which makes the magazine's self-positioning easier to discern. The electronic edition is convenient for searching and excerpting, suitable for textual analysis or classroom materials, but it is not meant for continuous reading as a general-interest book.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and editor's introduction first, then sample by section rather than reading page by page
  2. Read alongside background materials on nineteenth-century American history, noting social information in advertisements and book reviews
  3. Take notes on section arrangement and stylistic features for comparison with other periodicals
  4. For research, excerpt representative passages to build a small personal corpus

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
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  63. 63
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FAQ

Is this a complete book or a single issue of a periodical? It is an electronic reprint of Volume 1, Number 1 of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, the inaugural June 1850 issue. It is a periodical, not a standalone book. Its contents are a collection of articles across sections, suited to browsing and searching as a periodical.
How difficult is the English, and what background is needed? The original is nineteenth-century English with long sentences and some vocabulary distant from contemporary usage. University-level reading ability plus a dictionary is sufficient, but continuous reading is laborious; starting with shorter sections is recommended.
What is the electronic edition suitable for? It suits research citation, text excerpting, classroom materials, and comparative reading in publishing history. As a public-domain electronic text, it is easy to copy and search, but it offers no modern annotations or Chinese introduction.
What can be learned from this inaugural issue? One can observe the section structure, topic preferences, and reader positioning of a mid-nineteenth-century American general-interest periodical, as well as the period's ways of framing book reviews, essays, and current-affairs topics. It is an entry point for understanding periodical culture.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Various Author

Various is not a real person but a collective attribution used in book cataloging and databases for works with multiple authors, commonly applied to anthologies, compilations, or publications with too many contributors to list individually. On this Chinese book site, this attribution covers as many as 3,387 titles, spanning encyclopedic entries, historical documents, and trial records. Representative works include several volumes of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the record of the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Available public information is limited: nationality, birth and death dates, and common categories are not clearly recorded, making it difficult to summarize a unified writing style or personal biography. Readers should understand it as a cataloging convention rather than a single author.