Print networks and youth information culture: young people, amateur publishing, and children’s periodicals, 1867–1890
Thousands of young people throughout the 1870s and 1880s participated in the production of amateur newspapers and actively developed print networks to facilitate communication and the circulation of information among geographically dispersed peers, most of whom they had never met and would never meet in person. These young readers were not content merely to inhabit, as individual readers, the spaces created for them by professional publishers, editors, and authors in an expanding children’s market in the late nineteenth century, nor did they limit their interactions to those expected and encouraged by editors in the pages of children’s magazines and weekly story papers. These young amateur journalists sought to establish and expand peer social and information networks through and beyond the boundaries of the spaces created for them in children’s periodicals. This dissertation examines how these amateur print networks were established and maintained, as well as their multifaceted relationships with children’s magazines and weekly story papers. It also explores these social and information networks, along with amateur practices regarding documentation, dissemination, collection, and preservation, as indicators of a late nineteenth century youth information culture.
Amateur journalism, Amateur newspapers, American periodicals, Book history, Children’s literature, Children’s periodicals, History of childhood, Print culture
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign