University of Mississippi

                                             Postbellum Periodicals 

Published in 1974, ten years before his children’s periodical history guidebook, R. 

Gordon Kelly’s 

Mother Was A Lady: Self and Society in Selected American Children’s 

Periodicals 1865-1890 

examines the postbellum era. Brief histories of celebrated magazines 

such as 

St. Nicholas

, 

Our Young Folks

, and 

Youth’s Companion

 and narrative formulas used in 

children’s periodicals supplement this “study of cultural transmission and the difficulties faced—

and the solutions proposed—by an American gentry class intent on perpetuating their definitions 

of self and society amid the turmoil and disorder—at times it seemed to them the 

disintegration—of American life in the Gilded Age.”

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