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This essay calls for the concerted study of editorship as a distinct mode of cultural expression. Given that the collaborative craft of editors is often invisible, the study of editorship requires attending to the practices, habits, and techniques of editing as themselves historically contingent and significant objects of inquiry. This essay analyzes a cross section of editorial practices in 1862 when a controversy during the Civil War over slavery and emancipation entangled editors from Horace Greeley and Frederick Douglass to their less conspicuous peers at L'Union (a bilingual, Black Creole weekly in New Orleans). These examples reveal the practical language of editorship expressed through serial formats. By reading editing on its own terms, in the patterns of established formats and formal innovations, it becomes possible to envision the broader study of editorship not only for nineteenth-century Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and multilingual print cultures but also in the wider firmaments of literary and cultural history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This forum considers how we locate editors through brief case studies of multiethnic periodicals from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A focus on editors raises new questions and prospects for making visible the often hidden craft of periodicals across a wide variety of communities, contexts, and periods. Each contributor to this forum offers a case study that challenges any easy generalization about how editors have collaborated, where editors pioneered new periodical forms, and how the craft of editorship invites or dodges our critical gaze in the archives. Together, these pieces chart challenges and opportunities for considering the cultural contributions, aesthetics, and forms of expression that transcend author-centric literary histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]