Digital Commons Network^™

Inscribing The South For Harper's Weekly In 1866, Ashlyn Stewart

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The top weekly publication in the nineteenth-century United States, Harper’s Weekly, faced a new challenge after it had survived the Civil War: what would keep readers subscribing to the periodical in peacetime? To maintain their remarkably large readership, the editors looked southward and produced abundant content about the Reconstruction South for its primarily Northeastern readership. A noteworthy portion of that content was a series of powerful illustrated articles known as “Pictures of the South,” which ran from April to October 1866. Seasoned war correspondents Alfred R. Waud and Theodore R. Davis travelled through the rapidly rebuilding South on behalf of …