Three Decades of VQR, Gratis
By Waldo Jaquith
February 8th, 2009
We just flipped the switch and made public every single poem, story, essay, and book review that appeared in VQR from 1975 through 2003—the whole of Staige Blackford’s tenure as editor—online for all the world to see. That’s 3,169 works in all. Some of these were already publicly available—1,608 in all, but the remaining 1,561 had only teaser previews available, and could be read in their entirety only by subscribers.
Here’s a selection of some works that caught my attention:
- Edwin Yoder’s frank account of his time at the foundering Washington Star in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a job arranged by George Will, from 1993.
- Historian Stephen J. Whitfield looks back on the strange, funny, adventurous life of Abbie Hoffman.
- An appropriately-anonymous author’s defense of anonymity, praising the reuse of existing ideas rather than the insistence that one’s ideas were formed in a vacuum, from 1987.
- David M. O’Brien, in praise of presidents who pack the Supreme Court with people who agree with them, an issue liable come to the public’s attention within the next few years, from 1986.
- “The Masquers,” a poem by Joyce Carol Oates, from 1984.
- A mind-blowingly prescient prediction of Wikipedia, e-book readers, and political blogs from sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz back in 1983. This article will have to get a blog entry dedicated to it at some point.
- David Wyatt looks forward to the Star Wars franchise from back in 1982, when A New Hope (Episode IV) and The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V) were the only two movies, and he seems awfully excited.
- Richard T. Selden makes an ill-advised attempt to forecast the decade ahead for the economy, from back in 1980, in which he predicts that “inflation will continue to plague Americans” (wrong), employment growth will slow (wrong), GNP would grow by just 3% over the decade (wrong), and “the U.S. will pursue better economic policies in the 80′s than in the 70′s (let’s talk about “better”…).
- Murat Williams’s lament of the word “liberal” becoming a slur, from 1976.
- A 24-year-old Larry Sabato writes about his experience as an American studying at Oxford during the American bicentennial, from our Summer 1976 issue, relating that he “was locked in a cemetery in Paris, hit by a car in Florence, robbed at gunpoint in Rome,” and fell down the stairs of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
You can page through our last 34 years of issues and find some other gems. Three thousand articles is a lot of reading.
The Virginia Quarterly Review
February 8th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Thank you for doing this– I hope more magazines and publishers follow your lead. Open and free archives are good for readers, good for writers, and good for magazines. Thanks for being a part of that movement.
And that Star Wars article is pretty great. I actually feel kind of bad for Wyatt. He must be so disappointed.
February 8th, 2009 at 10:28 am
I’ve been telling friends about that article over the past few days, and the consensus is that we must track him down and ask him. I mean, I watched episodes II and III on ABC, because they didn’t even seem worth renting, especially after the ghastly experience of seeing Phantom Menace in the theater. How painful must that have been for Wyatt?
February 9th, 2009 at 6:29 am
I think a follow up article might be sort of brilliant. Track him down and give him a couple thousand words and see what happens.
February 9th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
[...] Quarterly Review, the award-winning lit mag HQ’d on the UVA Lawn, has uncorked nearly 30 years’ worth of archives, including a 1983 look at the democratizing aspects of computers and an early Larry Sabato [...]
February 10th, 2009 at 9:25 am
[...] public all of its articles published from 1975 to 2003. There is much to delight in; Waldo Jaquith picks a few starting points on the magazine’s [...]
February 10th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Kudos, Waldo, you’ve been listening!
February 11th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Those who enjoyed Horowitz’s “Printed Words, Computers, and Democratic Societies” will also enjoy Glen O. Robinson’s “The New Communications: Planning for Abundance,” from 1977.
On e-mail:
On broadband:
On mobile phones:
On the transition from print to reading online:
On Congress’ inability to deal with the problem of net neutrality:
Honestly, I’m a bit stunned. I had to double-check the date of the article in the database. I looked the author up, and he’s a law professor here at UVa and a former commissioner of the FCC 1974-76).
February 12th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Thanks!
February 13th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
[...] online at no cost; enjoy browsing the back issues, search for specific pieces, and check out these choice recommendations listed on the VQR [...]
March 8th, 2009 at 11:00 am
[...] Virginia Quarterly Review has opened its archives from 1975 to 2003 – everything is available. [...]