University of Mississippi

                                                        Beginnings  

 

The earliest children’s periodicals were an outgrowth of the eighteenth century 

Enlightenment and the shift away from the medieval conception of children as miniature adults 

who needed to have the devil beaten out of them.

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In January 1789, a Hartford, Connecticut 

newspaper and Bible printer named Barzillai Hudson and his partner George Goodwin published 

The Children’s Magazine, 

the first periodical for youth in the United States

 

48 years after 

Andrew Bradford and Benjamin Franklin introduced the colonies’ first magazines. R. Gordon 

Kelly deemed the ultimately unsuccessful monthly as “the first effort to create a periodical 

expressly for children.”

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The

 

Juvenile Olio

 and 

The Juvenile Magazine

 both appeared in 1802 

and existed 18 months. Moral lessons, sentimental verses, instructive tales, piety and deportment 

dominated children’s magazines until the middle of the nineteenth century.

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