THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT

"A magazine, when properly conducted, is the nursery of genius; and by constantly accumulating new matter, becomes a kind of market for wit and utility."

- Jeffrey Goldberg

The Pennsylvania Magazine had a brief run: It was published monthly from January 1775 to July 1776. The Declaration of Independence appeared in its last issue, in a regular section called "Monthly Intelligence."

Thomas Paine made this (true) statement in 1775, in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Magazine, for which he served as editor. In this same manifesto, he had unkind words for the magazine's older cousins. “The British magazines, at their commencement, were the repositories of ingenuity: They are now the retailers of tale and nonsense. From elegance they sunk to simplicity, from simplicity to folly, and from folly to voluptuousness.”

Paine, though enamored of the new American style of magazine making, resigned his post after less than a year because the owner refused to give him a raise. His premature departure allowed him time to write Common Sense, so a skinflint publisher inadvertently aided the cause of freedom.

The John Carter Brown Library, a treasury of American history on the campus of Brown University, holds the complete run of The Pennsylvania Magazine, and on a recent visit I became preoccupied with the July 1776 issue, the last one ever published. It is richly idiosyncratic. One article discusses the most effective way to prevent scurvy at sea (“one ounce and an half of the juice of oranges or lemons,” mixed with grog), and a lengthy exhortation warns women that their hairpins could kill them. “How little do our ladies imagine, when they surround their heads with wire, the most powerful of all conductors, and at the same time wear stockings, shoes, and gowns of silk, one of the most powerful repellants, that they prepare their bodies in the same manner, and according to the same principles, as electricians prepare their conductors for attracting the fire of lightning?”