The American Experiment

"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."

"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?"

Thomas Paine declared a properly conducted magazine to be a nursery of genius and a market for wit and utility. He criticized British magazines for declining from elegance to voluptuousness. Paine resigned his editorship within a year after a refused raise and used the time to write Common Sense. The John Carter Brown Library holds the complete run of The Pennsylvania Magazine. The July 1776 issue, the last published, contains idiosyncratic pieces including a citrus-based scurvy remedy and a warning that hairpins and silk garments could create conductor-repellant conditions risking lightning. A "Monthly Intelligence" section collects newly written constitutions of Virginia.

Read at The Atlantic