From Merrimack College and masters in phd from university of illinois at urbanachampaign. As a former magazine writer and editor her Research Interests include 19th century print culture, womens magazines and radical or alternative press. Before we begin the program i would like to extend a special welcome to anyone who will be joining virtual nhs program for the first time. If youre not familiar with the Massachusetts Historical Society with first historical site in america and had been collecting, preserving, publishing, sharing our history since 1791. We hold an amazing collection of 14 million man script pages including papers the first three president s of the United States. abim sorry, three of the first president of the United States. We are continuing to collect a today if youre interested, we are currently collecting material related to the covid19 experience. We have a special initiative designed to record peoples experiences during this unusual time and preserve a deserved sampling of firsthand accounts for future generations. In these days of social distancing we have taken to hosting virtual programs and we have online programs planned every week from now through the end of july. Even into the beginning of august. Next week we are hosting a talk by abyou can find more information on that on our website. Before we begin, we have a few quick housekeeping materials to go through. First of all, if you have a question, comment, or concern about the program or our general programs come you can contact me or our Public Programs according to an email will make it to us or you can reach us through our website. As i mentioned, we are producing all of our programs for free during covid19 period. But of course we are a nonprofit and independent nonprofit. If you have the capability and would like to support the Massachusetts Historical Society we would encourage you to do so and you knew that by visiting massachusetts. Org su pport. Just to go over the details of how we use zoom, we will have a presentation by miss harringtonlueker and then a question and answer period. There are two ways guests can ask questions the first is a fee use q a function if youre using a computer this is at the bottom of your screen you can use a tablet or cell phone it might be at the top of the screen. Essentially its the q a function and you can type a question in. Donna harringtonlueker and i will read the questions to our speaker and then she will answer them. The other way is to use the raised hands function this will allow you to indicate if youd like to ask question we will unmute people if we have time. The one thing the unmute function is if you most likely need to unmute yourself as well. Just keep that in mind. Without further ado, i am going to introduce our speaker today we are hearing from donna harringtonlueker and, donna, if youd like to turn on your camera and unmute yourself we will be off to the races. Great to see you and im now going to fade off into the digital. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you all for coming. Thank you to gavin and sarah for making this possible. Before we begin, i want to acknowledge these are such difficult times with so much at stake and so much on our minds as i worked on this lecture this presentation and the last week i must admit i found myself thinking, is this really the time to be talking about Summer Reading and summer leisure or even about 19th century publishing . But the last quarter of the 19th century the period that i focus on in my study it wasnt without its challenges. At the beginning of the period in 1877 federal troops were sent into quell a worker strike against the railroads and at the end the United States found itself in the spanishamerican war. Just jump in. I talk Summer Reading. I would like to star with blackwell. Primary abolitionist and womens right advocate. You can see a family portrait, a family photo over here on the left of the 3 of them. In the early 1870s, ellis was a teenager and she was a voracious reader. Stories turned into adventure and sensation. If you read journals of this period, they are filled with entries rushing into boston by train or streetcar and picked up the latest issue of popular ledger, popular weekly paper or she talked about stopping at the Boston Library for stacks of books that she devours one week and turns the next. A quote here from her journal, quote, change my books and got out in time for dinner she writes in july 1872. Ive adopt a very good set of books this time though ive read them all before. Among the titles that she mentions in the journal she mention it is gothic mystery called the thief and the night which she admits readily upset her nerves and Thomas Hughes at oxford which she describes as favorite. Alice took part in Summer Reading as well and thats the writing on the right. This is the family home. The stone blackwell household engaged in family reading. This was a common practice in 19th century n. The summer they did so on the widows walk. You can see it there, the home to take advantage of the cool breezes in the nearby bay. And there ellis reports the family read books Sir Walter Scott and vanity fair. They read long novels with plots which would be many summer evening and delight in the shared reading was absolutely apparent. Another quote from her journal, i chased popa about to tickle his toes. Im restrained informal given to action and adventure. Alice Summer Readings resinate with us today. Every year we are familiar with this, every year sometime around the memorial day weekend the Summer Reading season begins. Oprah makes her best pick for summer read, so does New York Times, the wall street journal and host of other media outlets. Summer is the time when we are advised to turn to lightweight paperbacks that we can stuff into a beach bag or read without worry by the pool side. Its the time where we are told to reach for the light popular novel or the actionpacked bestseller. Clyde barns, critic to New York Times wrote, in 1968, Summer Reading like the statute of liberty and motherhood is always with us. And thats still true today. The list of best summer reads continue on in this very, very fraught season. Ive just taken some screen grabs. The first one, two, three of them came from the weekend, memorial day weekend itself and the one on the bottom it was just from today, so we see here the top one is from the New York Times, the beach may be closed but the books are worth opening. The next one down refinery 29, fight for millennial young women, the 25 books youll want to read this summer. On the left its from oprah, 28 of the best beach reads of summer 2020. And then another list. This one came from todays, this afternoon boston globe online. The best books to read this summer and i might note here about the boston globe. I had chance to go quickly through it and see what they were recommending and i was really struck. At one point the New York Times was criticized for its book list that included primarily white authors, one season they were accused of having reach peak caucacity with their choices and the best choice to read this summer in the boston globe are incredibly varied and diverse. Okay, but where did this idea of Summer Reading come from . Reading is practice found to be an established part not only of literary commerce, but of American Culture as well and those are some of the questions that i begin to explore. So im a book historian and so i practice in the field that looks at the intersection of authorship, reading and publishing. History is field that concerns itself and first, but also with the cultural practices that surround books, how books are produced, how they are circulated and they are received. One summer, one june i was returning from halifax and looking for something to read on the flight home and i came across the brochure announcing the best summer reads for that season, and i found myself as a result kind of thinking of own Summer Reading rituals and the ways in which the Publishing Industry may have shaped and sustained those. So that led me to library of Brown University where i worked with the magazine called the book buyer, a magazine from charles, the story of new york city publisher, i will talk about it a little bit later, full of advertisements from other publishers, copy about the book trade was like and what people were reading and from there i moved on and i moved outward to other 19th century magazines and newspapers from across the United States. I didnt want to leave just new england. I included the africanamerican press of the period as well as number of alternative presses. After that, it was onto publishing archives and princeton and colombia onto letters and journals and to a long, long list of novels set of at summer resorts. Many written by absolutely periods famous authors, steven crane, lisa may and they all practiced summer novel at some point in their career. So what i found as a result of this, my summers were not now so idle, so what i found was very interesting chapter in the history of publishing. Summer readings to be sure in 19th century was very much a commercial construction. The idea of Summer Reading is a product that was part of the publishing, Publishing Industry really concerted efforts to redefine slow season and to capitalize on a really dramatic rise of travel, tourism and summer leisure in victorian american and gilded age but in the last quarter of 19th century it also became a well established cultural practice, performance and many of those characteristics remain with us today. Overall then, an interesting chapter in history to have book and the history of summer leisure. Now, my book is felt covered a lot of ground. I just briefly reproduced the table of contents here to give you just a little bit of a flavor of the larger argument as well. I looked at the dramatic rise of travel tourism and leisure in the period. One embraced by middle classes and increasingly uses it and the professional authors of the period indulge in summer leisure. I also look at a variety of books that were advertised as best summer reads and i look especially at the development of what i call the american summer novel. The novel that was specifically set at a summer resort. And finally, i looked at the ways in which authorship intersected with and kind of exploited this new genre and the way physical spaces shaped Summer Reading practices. I looked at resort libraries, Saratoga Springs to chairs advertised for porchside reading that had bookshelves built into the very, very wide arms. Today, though, i want to focus on one part of the books argument and that is the 19th century the role that 19th century magazine culture played in Summer Reading into practice. Im especially interested in the socalled facemaking publications and ive reproduced some covers of these here. These are the three most prominent. Atlanta monthly which was published in boston, rival in new york city, and century illustrated monthly. Now, their role is going to be very significant. These were publications that had significant degree of Cultural Authority an exemplar of yankee humanism in the kind that it featured. In this age of the magazine, these publications and others become the primary vehicle for what Jane Thompson calls the machinery of publishing and reviewing. That is the machinery that present to readers in a certain way, frames the text, establishes context for it and prepares us as readers to read it in a certain way and with a certain framework in mind. So together these and other publications, these and other magazines of this period shape the discourse on Summer Reading through their text and visual and thats what id like to explore. To give you an idea of where i want to go with this as we move ahead, its kind of in 3 parts, i want to look at early in the century. The very beginnings of a discourse on Summer Reading. I then want to move onto the complete disruption of shaped fiction that develops in the period and finally, i want to look at the publishers efforts to reframe and reclaim Summer Reading. We will see how that develops. Okay. So the first part, the very early discourse on Summer Reading. Lets just go back a bit and i have some images here. Paintings from the period. Domestic tour knicks the United States developed in the late 1700s around places like Niagara Falls seen here at the top, hudson river, tourism develops around there. By the 1 painting of horseback riding of the side of mount washington. They were in Mount Desert Island in maine, Mineral Springs in the south and host of other sites. Excuse me. Its allergy season if you can bear with me. New port, rhode island begins to take shape here as respite for the heat in the summer. I want to look at two magazines here to give you the tenure of how the discourse begins. On the left 1835 new england magazine, you can see here the opening story is on brown. 1835, article called summer philosophy and it began by invoking the political philosopher edman burke and his advice to live pleasant. Thats the theme of this article. Philosophy advise younger and less experienced travelers with ways to use their time and advised that they needed to use their time to cultivate and here is a quote, walk slow, think slow, read, dress, undress, in short live with studied and exquisite deliberation and that deliberation needed to expand to whatever reading matter the traveler chose. The number traveler, for example, was advised to avoid reading anything having to do with politics as well as anything that smacked egotism. The best articles were lord byron and lam. The reviewer wrote, quote, soda, glass of hawk, customary after dinner nap, jasmine and good girls under it. The young man who follows this advice and the article was specific about the gender of the Summer Reading would cultivate sweet serenity that was going to last until october. Putnam over here on the right, putnams in the 1850s is similarly approach. In 1853 putnams ran a review of a new poetry collection called book for seaside from the boston. Collection of poetry about works of shelley, longfellow and others and putnams was very keen on it and said it was not going to be not only summer read but permanent value. Later in 1850s putnam also recommend the work of Washington Irving for Summer Reading and describe irvine as a, quote, beautiful genius. Irvins work was series that would be quote delightful for Summer Reading. Here is first look at discourse taking place. Frames it as very, very distinctive in what it was designed to accomplish. By mid century that changed. That discourse is gone. The discourse changes and it does so in large part because really Interesting Development in the literary field and that is the wave of cheap paperback fiction that flooded the literary market after the civil war. This was unprecedented expansion of vocor victorian American Culture. This took various forms. First, in this period, this was before the passage of the International Copyright act. This wave of cheap fiction included editions of british and european fiction, so george elliot, lewis alice and wonderland, charles dickens, all of the work was not protected by copyright and in the United States picked them up and published them in cheap paper cover editions, often in libraries, sometimes multiple releasing of volume multiple times a week and cost to 10 to 20 cents a volume. Now readers probably wouldnt find theres in bookstores, the cheap paperbacks, instead they would find them at newsstands, railway kiosks and even on board trains and boys would sell snacks but also paperbound books. Book historian remarks that by 1870s virtually everyone who took a train for journey of anyone at all would have encountered a book from popular cheap library. Cheap fiction took another form as well. In stories from the socalled fiction factories these were stories that were quickly produced of questionable quality, they were long on murders and rescue and melodrama, very, very heavily formulate, real industrial commodity that flooded the market. Now, one other part of the mix of cheap fiction needs to be mentioned and that is the questionable and perceived to be very immoral french novel. Typically appearing in yellow paper covers, people talk about this throughout the period and by one of the period critics not just being sinful, all of this in the mix and you can see 3 of the cover that is would give you the flavor of this cheap fiction, so in the left, captives of the frontier, western stories were incredibly popular, they did a lot in the way of nation building and in the middle Level Library with lyndon, particularly aggressive about the absence of a copyright and then on the right, one of the most popular writers to have period libby, prolific in paper covers. Whats the relationship