Weekly Magazines

The first weekly magazines in English were news and propaganda journals issued by all the sides in the English Civil War of the 1640's. They are recognizably the ancestors of our weekly news magazines of today. By the middle of the nineteenth century America had several weekly "newspapers" that carried news, pictures of current events, opinion, advice, and fiction. As they continued to grow and change, some became more like magazines than newspapers, and so another category came about. Weekly magazines gave us fiction, news, photographs, fashions, and a sense of community. Everyone knows about the SATURDAY EVENING POST, if only because it published so many covers by Norman Rockwell. But there were dozens of magazines competing for the same audience.