nineteenth-century America, particularly the ways in which publishing companies
and people across the social spectrum used subscription publishing to negotiate
cultural, intellectual, and economic support for works according to their tastes
and values. This paper will examine the history of subscription publishing as it
changed during the nineteenth century with an eye toward the ways in which
other kinds of subscription goods, services, and organizations changed during
the same period. This paper will contextualize the ostensibly new, online
phenomenon of crowdfunding by demonstrating how subscription publishing
gave potential subscribers an opportunity not only to consume particular kinds of
information, but also to shape the production of knowledge for the imagined
benefit of American society. In giving them an opportunity to shape knowledge
production as subscribers, this publishing scheme simultaneously allowed even
common Americans to act as patrons of the press even as it further conditioned
them to exert political, cultural, and social agency primarily by acting as
consumers.
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