Joseph Dennie and The Farmer's Weekly Museum: Readership and Pseudonymous Celebrity in Early National Journalism

The early national period witnessed an explosion in newspaper journalism in terms of both the quantity of publications produced and their geographic reach. This essay examines these issues through the case of an editor, Joseph Dennie, who worked in New Hampshire in the late 1790s. Dennie is an early (although not an original) example of the dedicated, white-collar editor, and his Weekly Museum and Lay Preacher articles achieved widespread notice. Dennie did not, during his New Hampshire career at least, become a household name, by virtue of publishing exclusively under pseudonyms. The essay looks at the opportunities that this presented and what it allowed him to get away with.