Researchers of American print culture approach the topic from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives--history, communication studies, education, mass media studies, law, economics, sociology, reading and literacy, and more. To learn more about how scholars are approaching the study of American magazines, you might find it useful to browse through a few issues of American Periodicals, a scholarly journal devoted to the field.
The choice of research databases depends on your approach, but the following three databases are good bets for the start of your research.
If you have chosen a magazine devoted to science, technology, or medicine, you should search HSTM:
Magazines and the Making of America by Additional tips:
1. Look at the full catalog record in WorldCat for detailed information about date ranges, editorship, publisher, and extant issues in American libraries.
2. See if the magazine is mentioned in Mott's History of American Magazines, published from the 1930s through the 1960s. Note that Mott's evaluation of periodicals is very dated and has been superseded by more recent scholarship.
3. Search HathiTrust or AAS Historical Periodicals to see if the magazine is mentioned in other sources.
