The Arena was a liberal literary and political magazine published by Arena Publishing Co. in Boston, Massachusetts. It was founded by Benjamin Orange Flower in 1889 [1] and existed for twenty years. Though it had a circulation of more than 30,000 at one point, it was rarely profitable. The final issue was published in August 1909. [2]
The Arena was established by Benjamin Orange Flower in December 1889. The magazine was a monthly with volumes typically consisting of six issues. [3]
The magazine advocated social reform, featuring articles about poverty, slums, sweatshops, child labor, and other social problems. [1] It openly advocated birth control, free silver, agrarian reform, the single tax, and trust-busting. It was the only journal of national import to support William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Later, it advocated penal reform and opposed capital punishment. [4]
It published work by writers such as Upton Sinclair, Stephen Crane [5] and Hamlin Garland. Women wrote a quarter of the contents during its first twenty volumes. A section of Garland's Main-Travelled Roads first appeared in The Arena. [6] The Arena later employed investigative journalists and became known as a muckraker. The magazine published articles on socialism and was supportive of efforts to organize workers into trade unions. It favored literature that supported the poor and powerless. [2]
Edward Bellamy was an American author, journalist, and political activist most famous for his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of numerous "Nationalist Clubs" dedicated to the propagation of his political ideas.
Lyman J. Abbott was an American Congregationalist theologian, editor, and author.
Stephen Crane was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism. He is recognized by modern critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation.
Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr. was an American journalist and novelist during the Progressive Era, whose fiction was predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) and The Pit (1903).
The muckrakers were reform-minded journalists, writers, and photographers in the Progressive Era in the United States (1890s–1920s) who claimed to expose corruption and wrongdoing in established institutions, often through sensationalist publications. The modern term generally references investigative journalism or watchdog journalism; investigative journalists in the US are occasionally called "muckrakers" informally.
William Dean Howells was an American realist novelist, literary critic, and playwright, nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters". He was particularly known for his tenure as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, as well as for his own prolific writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day" and the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria.
Laurence Gronlund was a Danish-born American lawyer, writer, lecturer, and political activist. Gronlund is best remembered for his pioneering work in adapting the International Socialism of Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle to the American idiom in his popular 1884 book, The Cooperative Commonwealth, and for his influence upon the thinking of utopian novelist Edward Bellamy, newspaper publisher Julius Wayland, and the American socialist movement of the 1880s and 1890s.
Edwin Lawrence Godkin was an Irish-born American journalist and newspaper editor. He founded The Nation and was the editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post from 1883 to 1899.
Frank Parsons was an American professor, social reformer, and public intellectual. Although he was educated as an engineer at Cornell University, he passed the Massachusetts state bar examination and became a lawyer in 1881. Parsons was a lecturer at Boston University School of Law for more than a decade and taught at Kansas State Agricultural College from 1897 to 1899. As a leading social commentator of the Progressive Era, Parsons authored a dozen books and more than 125 magazine and journal articles on a wide range of reform topics, including currency reform, regulation of monopolies, municipal ownership, establishment of direct democracy, and other matters. Parsons is also widely regarded as the father of the vocational guidance movement.
Hannibal Hamlin Garland was an American novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer, Georgist, and psychical researcher. He is best known for his fiction involving hard-working Midwestern farmers.
Eben Eugene Rexford was an American writer and poet, and author of lyrics to popular and gospel songs.
Margaret Elizabeth Sangster was an American poet, author, and editor. Her poetry was inspired by family and church themes, and included hymns and sacred texts. She worked in several fields including book reviewing, story writing, and verse making. For a quarter of a century, Sangster was known by the public as a writer, beginning as a writer of verse, and combining later the practical work of a critic and journalist. Much of her writing did not include her name.
Arena Publishing Company was an American book and magazine publishing firm of the late 19th century, founded by author and editor B. O. Flower.
Benjamin Flower was an English radical journalist and political writer, and a vocal opponent of his country's involvement in the early stages of the Napoleonic Wars.
Julius Chambers, F.R.G.S., was an American author, editor, journalist, travel writer, and activist against psychiatric abuse.
Nationalist Clubs were an organized network of socialist political groups which emerged at the end of the 1880s in the United States of America in an effort to make real the ideas advanced by Edward Bellamy in his utopian novel Looking Backward. At least 165 Nationalist Clubs were formed by so-called "Bellamyites," who sought to remake the economy and society through the nationalization of industry. One of the last issues of The Nationalist noted that "over 500" had been formed. Owing to the growth of the Populist movement and the financial and physical difficulties suffered by Bellamy, the Bellamyite Nationalist Clubs began to dissipate in 1892, lost their national magazine in 1894, and vanished from the scene entirely circa 1896.
Main-Travelled Roads is a collection of short stories by the American author Hamlin Garland. First published in 1891, the stories are set in what the author refers to as the "Middle Border," the northwestern prairie states of Wisconsin, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota and South Dakota. In the book's eleven stories, Garland portrays the hardships of agrarian life, deconstructing the conventional myth of the American prairie while highlighting the economic and social conditions that characterized agricultural communities in the rural Midwest.
Benjamin Orange Flower, known most commonly by his initials "B.O.", was an American muckraking journalist of the Progressive era. Flower is best remembered as the editor of the liberal commentary magazine The Arena, published in Boston, New York City, and Trenton, New Jersey by the Arena Publishing Co. from 1889 until 1909.
The New Nation was a weekly newspaper launched in Boston, Massachusetts in January 1891 by the American socialist writer Edward Bellamy. The paper served as a de facto national organ of the nationwide network of Nationalist Clubs and expounded upon their activities and political ideas, which derived from the best-selling 1888 novel Looking Backward.
Howard F. Cline was an American government official and historian, specialising in Latin America. Cline served as Director of the Hispanic Foundation at the Library of Congress from 1952 until his death in June 1971. He was one of the founders of the Latin American Studies Association. He was also active in the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), the professional organization of Latin American historians, which he chaired in 1964. He is still highly regarded as a scholar "devoted to and effective in the promotion of Latin American studies in the United States."