The Kentucky Experience.

Magazine publishing in America began in the East, especially in cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, where educational institutions and communities of scholars, journalists, and readers could support both general and specialized periodicals. As Americans moved west, building towns and cities, establishing schools and churches, they began to reproduce in the West some of the culture of the East. Once presses, paper, and type were available in the West, a variety of periodicals sprang up. One of the first was Medley, or Monthly Miscellany, a twenty-page monthly that lasted throughout 1803 in Lexington, Kentucky. In fact, Lexington became an early publishing center in the West, largely because of Transylvania University, a school that attracted several scholarly writers to its faculty. Another important Lexington-based magazine was the Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine, a monthly started in 1819 by a New Englander...