A (Very) Brief History of The Atlantic
Jeffrey Goldberg
Editor in Chief, The Atlantic
In the spring of 1857, a group of Boston transcendentalists gathered for dinner at the Parker House Hotel. After five hours of repartee, they decided to create a new magazine, one that would make politics, literature, and the arts its chief concerns.
They were united in three ways: their opposition to slavery, their love of American writing, and their tripartite names—including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Russell Lowell. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was invited, but she boycotted the dinner when she learned that alcohol would be served.
After everyone agreed on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s proposed name, a plan for The Atlantic was set. The founders wanted to be “fearless and outspoken” at the dawn of “a new era of human civilization.” In a manifesto, they promised to be “the organ of no party or clique”; to “honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea”; and to care for the “whole domain of aesthetics.” The manifesto was signed by, among others, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and yes, "Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe."
In November of 1857, the first issue was published, and we have never stopped publishing. Since its founding, The Atlantic has published everyone from the aforementioned Hawthorne (who served as the magazine's Civil War correspondent) to Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman; from Robert Frost and Helen Keller to W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington; from Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf to Mark Twain and Sylvia Plath; from a raft of future presidents—Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and JFK—to the great writers of the present, too many to even begin mentioning.
We know that the America of today would be unrecognizable to the founders of this magazine, but my hope is that they would take quickly to today's Atlantic. They would recognize in our journalism the stringent application of intelligence and analytic rigor to the great problems of the day; the devotion to the explication of not only the American idea, but also the nature of an unsettled world; and a great love of literature and culture in all of its manifestations.
I believe that the founders would be able to locate these values in our print magazine, on our website, at our events, in our podcasts, and in our documentaries. (I also believe that they would be confused by our Instagram account.)
I write to thank you, an Atlantic subscriber, for supporting our journalism and for taking part in our great adventure.
With best wishes,
Jeffrey Goldberg
Editor in Chief, The Atlantic
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