GSLIS doctoral student Mikki Smith has received a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) for her project, “Even a boy’s press has ‘a power’: Amateur journalism and youth information culture, 1867-1890,” which will form the basis of her dissertation.
The Peterson Fellowship is awarded to individuals engaged in scholarly research and writing, including doctoral dissertations, in any field of American history and culture through 1876. Fellows are selected based on the applicant’s scholarly qualifications, the scholarly significance or importance of the project, and the appropriateness of the proposed study to the Society's collections.
Smith’s dissertation will explore how young people in the late nineteenth century actively used print—both periodicals created for them and papers created by them—to form peer networks across geographic space and to participate in a youth information culture. In explaining her research, Smith said:
In the 1870s and 1880s, thousands of young people were involved in writing for, editing, printing, circulating, and reading amateur newspapers that were generally created on small tabletop presses. During the same period, a number of new juvenile periodicals and weekly story papers had tens of thousands of subscribers around the country. Many young subscribers wrote letters to the editors in which they shared opinions, asked for information and advice about a range of topics, and submitted their own writing for publication. They also sought correspondents who shared their interests, publicized their amateur papers, and organized collaborations on amateur publishing projects.By focusing on the networks that young amateur journalists and readers of juvenile periodicals formed through print, I hope to develop an understanding of how these young people appropriated technology and space to engage in a collaborative social process of meaning making, as well as collaborative social processes of cultural production and information exchange in the late nineteenth century.
This summer, Smith will spend one month at the AAS in Worcester, Massachusetts, researching the society’s Amateur Newspaper Collection.