Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, later renamed Leslie's Weekly, was an American illustrated literary and news magazine founded in 1852 and published until 1922. It was one of several magazines started by publisher and illustrator Frank Leslie.

Throughout its decades of existence, the weekly provided illustrations and reports—first with wood engravings and Daguerreotypes, later with more advanced forms of photography—of wars from John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry and the Civil War until the Spanish–American War and the First World War.

History

The Illustrated Newspaper was founded in 1852. John Y. Foster was the first editor of the weekly, which came out on Tuesdays. There were 30 copies of the first edition printed. By 1897, its circulation had grown to an estimated 65,000 copies.^[1]

After Leslie's death in 1880, the magazine was continued by his widow, the women's suffrage campaigner Miriam Florence Leslie. The name, by then a well-established trademark, remained also after 1902, when it no longer had a connection with the Leslie family. It continued until 1922.^[2]

It often took a strongly patriotic stance and frequently featured cover pictures of soldiers and heroic battle stories. It also gave extensive coverage to less martial events such as the Klondike gold rush of 1897, covered by San Francisco journalist John Bonner.

Among the writers publishing their stories in the weekly were Louisa May Alcott, H. Irving Hancock, Helen R. Martin, Eleanor Franklin Egan, and Ellis Parker Butler. Several notable illustrators worked for the publication, including Albert Berghaus and Norman Rockwell, who created covers for the magazine in its latter years, and Fernando Mirando y Casellas.

Surviving copies of the magazine at present fetch handsome prices as collectors' items and are considered to give a vivid picture of American life during the decades of its publication.

See also

• Cathedral of All Saints (Albany, New York)

Gallery

• 
  Mary Todd Lincoln with sons William and Tad (December 15, 1860)
• 
  An 1863 illustration showing General Stephen G. Burbridge planting the Union flag after the capture of Arkansas Post
• 
  Joseph Keppler illustration ridiculing U.S. Indian policy (September 18, 1875)
• 
  An 1879 illustration depicting the Meeker Massacre in Colorado
• 
  Cover about the Spanish–American War (June 30, 1898)
• 
  President Theodore Roosevelt (April 7, 1904)
• 
  Fact and Fiction by Norman Rockwell (January 11, 1917)
• 
  Cover promoting participation in the first presidential election since ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (October 2, 1920)

References

1. ↑ N.W. Ayer & Son, The American Newspaper Annual (New York, 1897) 1896: Journals of the Campaign).
2. ↑ Nelson, Randy F. The Almanac of American Letters. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981: 66. ISBN 0-86576-008-X

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.

• 1890 volume of paper, via Google books
• Coverage of the laying of the 1858 Atlantic Cable in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
• "At the Gate of Klondike" by John Bonner in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1858
• Sketch depicting Oscar Wilde from Leslie's Weekly
• The San Francisco Earthquake in Leslie's Weekly
• Leslie's Weekly, Volume 133, Issue 3451. From Google books.