Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Magazine Lecture
I never knew that magazines had such the impact on us as they do. I had always just imagined that it had had just started with magazines such as" People" and continued on from there. I was surprised to learn that Ben Franklin was the creator of magazines in 1741, and that the creation of magazines helped the literacy rate improve in colonial America. It was also interesting to me that just one magazine had something to offer for everyone. It's hard for me to visualize all of the different materials aimed at so many different people all compacted into one magazine. I'm used to the idea of roaming down the magazine aisle at Kroger, and seeing numerous magazines geared towards all different audiences all stacked on display. For example, there is a sport's magazine geared towards men. There is a home and gardening magazines towards mothers, and there is a teen vogue magazine geared towards teenage females. It was also interesting for me to learn that magazines were the first to have a national audience. I could have never guessed that magazines helped create a sense of national identity for early Americans, along with a sense of culture. Also, earlier in our class discussion, Phoebe's question made me curious. Where does the name magazine come from?
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Good question. Here's the answer:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magazine#History
The Gentleman's Magazine, first published in 1731, in London, is considered to have been the first general-interest magazine. Edward Cave, who edited The Gentleman's Magazine under the pen name "Sylvanus Urban", was the first to use the term "magazine," on the analogy of a military storehouse of varied materiel, ultimately derived from the Arabic "makhazin" ("storehouses") by way of the French language. Wordsmith offers this origin: "Plural of Arabic: مخزن makhzan: storehouse, used figuratively as "storehouse of information" for books, and later to periodicals).