Sarah Cooper, a young white woman living in Virginia in the early 1820s, dreamed of a life beyond the confines of her family’s farm. Cooper fashioned herself a future journalist, the editor of some important big-city daily. Too young perhaps to realize fully the limits placed on her gender by society, Cooper – probably inspired by the many newspapers and magazines read by her parents and neighbors in Fairfax County – went beyond simply daydreaming of a future career as an editor. With painstaking effort, she handwrote her own edition of a literary magazine. The first of her attempts that survive, an unnamed four-page journal, consisted of a mix of poetry, stories, and short selections, all meticulously written in columns just as they might appear if published. Her opinions and personality show through; one selection referred to men as “the vain things.” Two years later, still fashioning herself an editor, she composed by hand another homemade magazine entitled “The Fulminator.” In addition to composing poems and short stories, Cooper carefully illustrated a masthead, complete with the title, subscription terms, and volume number, and even took the trouble to draw ersatz advertisements.