Informing the South: On the Culture of Print in Antebellum Augusta, Georgia 1828-1860

Long before Atlanta laid claim to the title, Augusta was regarded as Georgia's principal economic market and cultural and information hub. Sitting at the center of a catchment zone that spanned some twenty-two counties and two states, Augusta supplied goods, services, and cultural enrichment to a region whose economic livelihood was sustained by plantation slavery. Antebellum Augusta boasted a robust print scene; the city was home to several daily newspapers, agricultural, literary, and medical journals, as well as diverse library cultures, which included both periodical and agricultural reading rooms and one of the nation's largest medical libraries at the Medical College of Georgia. Despite this vibrant print scene, historians have largely neglected Augusta's position as a major producer of print material culture for both Georgia and the Southern United States.;This dissertation presents a microhistory of Southern reading that rebuffs both historical and modern notions that the antebellum South was largely illiterate and uninterested in cultural advancement. Augustan commercial and educational institutions used print material culture, in the form of periodicals, as an efficient technology to help establish a new genre of Southern professional reading. The consumption of practically-oriented reading in the South constituted a reactive genre of print culture. Print emanating from Augusta possessed a hyper-awareness of its geographically-situated and socially-constructed Southern location. Augustan publishers used this shared awareness of space, place, and perceived social status, in contrast to the North, as a marketing strategy to attract and sustain a specifically Southern readership. I illustrate these claims by drawing upon evidence from a variety of Augusta-based print genres encompassing business (jobbing), the Southern Cultivator and Southern Medical & Surgical Journal, as well as an analysis of the city's reading rooms and medical library, all of which fostered a practical literacy aimed at the self-improvement of local clerks, aspiring agriculturalists and physicians.