
Tammy Horn, Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 42, 54. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Dutton, 1957), 130.Īnn Fairfax Withington, “Republican Bees: The Political Economy of the Beehive in Eighteenth-Century America,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 18 (1988): 39–77. On the Gentleman’s Magazine as a model for the Pennsylvania Magazine, see Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 25–30. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. 1 No publication is, he contends, “more calculated to improve or infect than a periodical one.” “A magazine, when properly conducted, is the nursery of genius … a kind of market of wit and utility.” 2 Keywords “America has now outgrown the state of infancy,” Paine argues, and therefore needs the enlarged “opportunities of acquiring and communicating knowledge” that a magazine will provide.

While Paine was not the editor of the inaugural issue, he contributed the lead article, “The Utility of This Work Evinced,” usually referred to today as “The Magazine in America,” on his vision for the new magazine. Despite his having no editorial experience and only one known published work, the Pennsylvania Magazine soon became under Paine’s editorship the most successful and widely read periodical that had yet been published in the New World. In January of 1775, less than two months after he arrived in America, Thomas Paine was hired by the printer and bookseller Thomas Aitken to be the editor of his forthcoming journal, the Pennsylvania Magazine, or, American Monthly Museum.
