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Under Fletcher’s guidance, the firm started Harper’s Monthly in June 1850. The first managing editor was Henry Raymond, who soon went on to help found and then publish the New York Times. Harper’s Monthly became and still is an outstanding literary magazine.
The new technique, which enabled weekly news periodicals to meet publication deadlines, involved dividing the drawing into many pieces after it was completed. The pieces were assigned to separate engravers for each block; when completed the blocks were reassembled and bolted together. Double-page prints required up to 40 blocks. (The thin white lines between blocks can be seen in some of the Harper’s Weekly illustrations.)
From its founding in 1857 until the Civil War broke out in April 1861, the publication took a moderate editorial stance on slavery and related volatile issues of the day. It had substantial readership in the South, and wanted to preserve the Union at all costs. Some critics called it "Harper’s Weakly." Harper ’s Weekly would have preferred William Seward or possibly even Stephen Douglas for president in 1860, and was lukewarm towards Lincoln early in his administration. When war came, however, its editorials embraced Lincoln, preservation of the Union, and the Republican Party. Military coverage became paramount in every issue, as its news and illustrations kept soldiers at the various fronts and their loved ones at home up to date on the details of the fighting.The following quotation from the April 1865 issue of the North American Review shows how a leading peer publication viewed the wartime contributions of Harper ’s Weekly.
After the war, Harper’s Weekly continued to be a major factor in Ulysses Grant’s presidential victories in 1868 and 1872, the overthrow of New York City political boss William Tweed in 1871 and the first election of Grover Cleveland in 1884. Its circulation exceeded 100,000, peaking at 300,000 on occasion, while readership probably exceeded half a million people. Thomas Nast’s devastating cartoons drew national acclaim. As Boss Tweed said, "I don’t care so much what the papers write about me ― my constituents can’t read, but they can see them damned pictures.”
As a retirement project, I decided to have this uniquely important journal manually indexed. Harper’s Weekly never had a useful index, so until now there has been no way for students and researchers to access the illustrations, cartoons, news, literature, editorials, and ads that these volumes contain without spending hours poring over microfilm or locked-up original copies in rare book rooms of libraries. Harper’s Weekly is really the only consistent, comprehensive, week-to-week chronological record of what happened world-wide in the last half of the nineteenth century. ![]() The reason for manually indexing Harper’s Weekly is to put nineteenth century language, occurrences and illustration content into twenty-first century terminology. For example: Should the 1858 New Jersey lady who owned a pistol be allowed to keep it? We index that item under "Women’s rights," although the term was not used in the 1858 article’s content. Since 1995, up to 12 indexers with advanced degrees have read every word and studied every illustration and cartoon in Harper ’s Weekly, and have carefully constructed user-friendly indexes that will guide you in locating information quickly and concisely. The information is presented in an easy-to-navigate, alphabetical, multi-level structure familiar to scholars, reference librarians and students alike. Descriptive sub-entries will help you determine the relative value of the references by giving you specific information about an entry prior to display.The 56 years of Harper’s Weekly provide a continuous record of what happened on a weekly basis from 1857 through 1912. The first segment includes the Civil War Era: 1857-1865. The next two cover Reconstruction: 1866-1871 and 1872-1877. The last six encompass the Gilded Age: 1878-1912.
If "Haiti" doesn’t show up in Searchable Full-text, try it in the Thesaurus-based index; (it was spelled "Hayti" in the nineteenth century). If First Lieutenant J. E. Tuthill doesn’t appear in the Thesaurus-based index, try him in Searchable Full-text.
Thank you for getting acquainted with HarpWeek. Enjoy! John Adler, Publisher
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