Daily Life and History: Chronicling, Narrating, and Capturing the Banal and the Extraordinary in American Periodicals (19th-21st Centuries)
June, 17th and 18th 2027, Université de Rouen-Normandie (ERIAC)
Co-organized with the Université Marie & Louis Pasteur (ELLIADD)
This conference aims to discuss the role of American periodicals in conveying the sense of both history and daily life to their readers, from the 19th century to the present day. Various analytical lenses may be used to investigate the topic, including but not limited to history, literature, visual arts or periodical studies. Whether they are confidential and community-based or part of the mainstream and likely to have a mass audience, periodicals usually provide readers with a way to decipher and understand the world around them through illuminating essays, timely literary texts or striking images. Editing periodicals, by its very nature, means fragmenting the historical continuum within distinct time frames – dailies, weeklies or monthlies for the most part. Yet, whatever the cycle chosen, newspapers and magazines also need to fit within their readers’ routine, a reading practice sandwiched in between other daily activities.
How have periodicals framed history and daily life in texts and images? How did this framing evolve over time? Was it due to new editors, a change of readership, technical and technological breakthroughs, or for other reasons? How did the materiality of the medium affect the depiction of history and daily life?
Axis 1. Historical records of daily life and recording history daily
In the early 1930s, the Great Depression affected millions of people and was the greatest economic crisis in the history of the country. Yet, when S.C. Perkins et al. studied letters to the editors published in the Chicago Defender, they wondered: “why did so few readers and editorials discuss the stock market crash and subsequent Depression?” (58). They concluded that people did not notice History with a capital H was being made since they were too busy making ends meet. How did history and daily life coexist within the pages of periodicals? How were the intimate and the banal interwoven with the public and the extraordinary? As in the case of John Hersey’s article on the Hiroshima bombing released in 1946 in The New Yorker, how could the petite histoire offer insightful glimpses into a larger history?
We also wish to explore the tension which results from competing temporalities, between that of the news cycle and long-term history. Was the latter necessarily curated and fragmented by editors? The rhythm of periodical publication presupposes the existence of gaps and moments of silence. If writing history partly entails reorganizing events into a meaningful sequence, proposals discussing the events that were – willingly or inadvertently – left out of publications or overemphasized would be welcome. In that regard, to what extent can periodicals be seen as Bourdieusian “structuring structures” in the perception of history and daily life in the US? How did periodicals contribute in building up a sense of historical perspective? This was sometimes achieved through the emphasis on particular anniversaries. For instance, on July 1st, 1876, the then president of the American Woman Suffrage Association, Mary Livermore, enjoined readers of Woman’s Journal to gather in Philadelphia for the celebration of the woman suffrage centennial in New Jersey. It was the occasion to reaffirm that “the consent of the governed is the basis of a just government” and to organize a public meeting; the short news item thus served to connect the wider history with regular grassroots mobilizations.
Likewise, periodicals sometimes offer spaces where counter narratives can emerge. These counter narratives can be illustrated through the very choice of topics treated – The Village Voice was for example among the first publications to cover the AIDS crisis or the budding hip-hop movement with seriousness (Romano) – or through the voice of their readers who are temporarily allowed to intervene in the public debate in letters-to-the-editors’ sections – letters that are specifically chosen by editors to create their ideal readership (Congdon). Ethnic newspapers in the 19th century exemplified this counter history made from below, when immigrant newspapers were tasked with translating “American events for their readers in cultural terms familiar to those audiences” (Shapiro, 7), showing the necessity to call on the intimate to make sense of what happened in the public sphere. When studying periodicals, are there parts of a magazine or a newspaper which tend to be readily dismissed as irrelevant because they appear anchored in a daily life deemed mundane and meaningless? How can we understand the work of the historian on ephemeral publications that perhaps never meant to become archival repositories?
Axis 2. Keeping fingers on the literary pulse
Our second axis will focus on literary texts published in US periodicals. It will explore the polysemy at work in the French term “histoire”, that can mean both “history” and “story”. How do literary authors use History to create fiction? Conversely, how do stories tell History? Literary texts sometimes depict characters who live through eventful eras (wars, depressions) while remaining absorbed by their immediate, day-to-day interactions. One can think of Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms, first serialized in Scribner’s, in which the backdrop of WWI slowly recedes to evolve into a love story. The “act of reading” (Chartier) magazines was sometimes inscribed within literature. We welcome papers investigating how narrators use the image of journalism and periodicals to build up or inflect their storyline.
When Tom Wolfe published his first novel The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987, it had previously been released in 27 installments in Rolling Stone. This echoed a common 19th-century practice characteristic of the Victorian era but also tried by US authors such as Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet Beecher Stowe or Henry James. However, Wolfe’s original text was so heavily revised in the process that “practically every sentence was reworked” (Jones). We wish to examine what the fragmentation induced by periodicals do to the text: how does this fragmentation alter stories and/or literary history? Did an intertext between authors and readers materialize in the periodicals, through the letters-to-the-editors section for instance?
Besides, a part of the history of American literature was made in the periodicals, underlining the porosity between the two. Firstly, many US authors initially approached writing through a form of journalism, be it Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Truman Capote or Ta-Nehisi Coates. Secondly, periodicals have been used by authors, either as a testing ground for new ideas – examples include The Dial for transcendentalists or New Challenge for the South Side Writers Group led by Richard Wright – or as inspiration for literary material – we can here think of authors like Don DeLillo or John Dos Passos who use news-clipping aesthetics or journalistic paratexts to anchor fiction in time. In this regard, papers looking into the articulation of fiction around the notion of event will be welcome. This articulation can entail a circularity between media: for instance, DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall was not only issued first in a periodical, it then became the introduction to the novel Underworld, itself set around a historical event (Daanoune). Thus, can the circulation of a story on different media increase its importance in literary history? This circularity may be approached via a different route: how books, entering the daily life and the daily routine of middle-class America, are part of the rhythm of the everyday? This idea was highlighted in Janice Radway’s seminal work on the Book-of-the-Month Club showing how books shape cultural history through taste making on a monthly, subscription basis.
Axis 3. Visual and paratextual dimensions
In the opening of his article “Monster events”, French historian Pierre Nora asserted that “the mass media now have a monopoly on history”, suggesting that the long-held prerogative of historians – determining what constituted an event and assigning it its importance – shifted to the mass media. How did smaller periodicals grasp with the notion of historical event? What does the mass media monopoly on history entail? Through an increased focus on sensationalism, periodicals used iconic visuals and photographs which both illustrated and made history (Rouquet). On the contrary, celebrated photographs by Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans have proven that a focus on the mundane can also achieve historical status.
Thus, our third axis will focus on the rich iconography contained in magazines and newspapers, including photographs, drawings, periodical covers, sketches, political cartoons, or comics. A common warning heard from historians is that “history might repeat itself”. Nowhere is it made more obvious than in the circulation of images and visual components, alternately copied, borrowed, revamped or satirized from one periodical to the next. One example would be famous magazine covers which were later spoofed or emulated – one can think of Muhammad Ali appearing as Saint Sebastian on the cover of Esquire in 1968 or of Demi Moore posing naked and pregnant for Vanity Fair in 1991. In a news cycle under a constant need of renewal, how can we interpret these homages to images which simultaneously get memorialized and gain a more modern currency? The cyclicity and circulation of images between different time periods, between everyday life and the extraordinary is perhaps best exemplified in the fashion press. To what extent does the news cycle contrast, subvert or align with the writing of history?
Lastly, the visual dimension of periodicals owes a lot to the technological breakthroughs that made certain layouts and modes of reproduction possible. Before the introduction of Kodachrome technology by Eastman-Kodak in 1935, Condé Nast had been one of the pioneers in the printing of color photographs in Vogue (Krause-Wahl), helping the magazine establish its pedigree. Beyond the trailblazing dimension of new printing practices, what did these technological revolutions entail in terms of price, circulation, or reading habits? How did these changes affect the daily consumption of periodicals? We welcome papers dissecting the interaction between visual components and page layout, investigations that rely on paratextual studies and image-text practices to decipher the historical dimension contained in periodicals.
Paper proposals (300 words) along with a short bio-bibliography are to be sent before December 11, 2026, via dailyhistory.sciencesconf.org or sent directly to amelie.macaud@umlp.fr and yohann.lucas@univ-rouen.fr. Accepted papers will be announced by January 11, 2027. Communications can be in English or French.
Suggested topics
· Manufacturing the event
· Articulation of the banal and the extraordinary
· Structuring and fragmentation of history and daily life
· Editorializing the event, the uneventful
· Circularity between different media
· Letters-to-the-editor sections
· Iconicity of the event, iconicity of daily life
· Image-text approaches
· Materiality of history and daily life
· Impact of technological breakthroughs
· Archiving daily life, archiving history
· Ephemerality vs. archive
· Competing temporalities
Organized by
Yohann Lucas (Université de Rouen Normandie) and Amélie Macaud (Université Marie et Louis Pasteur)
Scientific committee
Cécile Cottenet (Aix Marseille Université)
Karim Daanoune (Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier)
Nicolas Labarre (Université Bordeaux Montaigne)
Alice Morin (Université de Lorraine)
Pauline Pilote (Sorbonne Université)
Camille Rouquet (CY Cergy Paris Université)
Bibliography
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Chartier, Roger (dir.). Les pratiques de la lecture. Paris : Éditions Rivages, 1985.
Chéroux, Clément. « Le déjà-vu du 11-Septembre. » La trame des images/Histoires de l’illustration photographique, 20, 2007, pp. 148-173.
Congdon, Brian. Leading with the Chin: Writing American Masculinities in Esquire, 1960-1989. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2018.
Daanoune, Karim. L’écriture de l’évènement dans la fiction de Don DeLillo. Littératures. Université Michel de Montaigne – Bordeaux III, 2014.
Jones, Ian. “Why I spent three years tracking down the original serialization of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities”. The Independent. May 30th, 2018.
Kitch, Carolyn. Pages from the Past: History & Memory in American Magazines. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Krause-Wahl, Antje. “American Fashion and European Art – Alexander Liberman and the Politics of Taste in “Vogue” of the 1950s”. Journal of Design History, Vol. 28, No. 1, Special Issue: Between Avant-Garde and Commercialism: Reconsidering Émigrés and Design, 2015, pp. 67-82.
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Morin, Alice. Au coeur des magazines : de collaborations en négociations, le système des images de mode américaines (années 1960-années 1980). Civilisation américaine – Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris, 2018.
Nora, Pierre. « L’événement monstre. » Communications, 18, 1972, pp. 162-172.
Nord, David Paul. Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-class desire. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Romano, Tricia. The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture. Public Affairs, 2024.
Rouquet, Camille. Les icônes du Vietnam et leur pouvoir: Mécanismes de consecration des images photojournalistiques et rhétorique de l’influence des médias depuis la guerre du Vietnam. Langues et Cultures des Sociétés Anglophones – Paris Diderot-Paris 7, 2017.
Shapiro, Shelby. Words to the Wives: The Yiddish Press, Immigrant Women, and Jewish-American Identity. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2024.
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Turner, Mark W. “Time, Periodicals, and Literary Studies.” Victorian Periodicals Review, 39, 4, 2006, pp. 309-316.