ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses magazines as media of memory: often carrying museum, repository or asylum in their titles, magazines were meant to preserve valuable material and to act as important storage facilities. Like museums, magazines belonged to what Jürgen Habermas described as the public sphere, i.e., they were implied in the consolidation of a social environment defined by polite and enlightened interaction. In the course of the eighteenth century, the number of magazines in America steadily increased but literally exploded in the 1770s, when the Revolutionary spirit sought to make itself heard through as many channels as possible. The magazine's editor, Isaiah Thomas, shows awareness of his magazine's dependency on subscribers, who after all provided the main income at a time when advertisement was not yet a financially viable practice in magazine publishing.
