The Atlantic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Atlantic was born at a dinner party. In the autumn of 1857, a Boston publisher named Moses Dresser Phillips gathered a remarkable group of men at the Parker House Hotel. He sat down with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and others at three in the afternoon. They rose at eight. Phillips later wrote that it was "the richest time intellectually by all odds" he had ever experienced. From that five-hour table came a magazine that would publish the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and a 1945 essay that helped inspire the invention of hypertext technology. How did a literary journal founded to argue for the abolition of slavery become one of America's most influential media institutions? And what does it mean that, more than 165 years later, the magazine is still here?

• 2. The Parker House Table

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  Phillips knew exactly what he was doing when he assembled that guest list. He admitted in his own letter that Emerson was the better philosopher, Lowell knew more of the old poets, and Motley could write history more capably. His argument for why he should lead the venture was simpler: "None of you knows the American people as well as I do." The dinner included an invitation to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who declined because the gathering served alcohol. She nonetheless signed the manifesto that laid out the magazine's goals, alongside Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Atlantic credits her today as one of its founders. James Russell Lowell was named the first editor. The first issue appeared in November 1857 and quickly earned a reputation as one of the finest magazines in the English-speaking world. Within three years, the magazine was being published by Boston's Ticknor and Fields, the house that later became part of Houghton Mifflin.

• 3. Abolition and Literary Ambition

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  Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" appeared in The Atlantic on the 1st of February, 1862, making the magazine one of the first to print the song that became synonymous with the Union cause. William Parker's slave narrative, "The Freedman's Story," ran in February and March of 1866. The magazine also published Charles W. Eliot's "The New Education," a call for practical reform in schools that contributed to his appointment to the presidency of Harvard University in 1869. In 1878, the magazine absorbed The Galaxy, a competitor monthly that had published Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Henry James. By 1879, The Atlantic maintained offices at Winthrop Square in Boston and at 21 Astor Place in New York City. The Atlantic Monthly Press, founded in 1917 and run for many years in partnership with Little, Brown and Company, published books including Drums Along the Mohawk in 1936 and Blue Highways in 1982 before it was sold in 1986 and eventually became an imprint of Grove Atlantic.

• 4. Words That Moved History

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  Ernest Hemingway's short story "Fifty Grand" appeared in the July 1927 edition, placing the magazine squarely in the middle of the literary ferment of the 1920s. In its August 1963 edition, at the height of the civil rights movement, the magazine published Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" under the headline "The Negro Is Your Brother." Vannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think," published in July 1945, is the magazine's most consequential piece of speculative writing. Douglas Engelbart and later Ted Nelson read it and used its ideas to develop the modern workstation and hypertext technology. In the 21st century, influential cover stories included Anne Marie Slaughter's "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" in 2012 and Ta-Nehisi Coates's "A Case for Reparations" in 2014. Jeffrey Goldberg's "Obama Doctrine" in 2015 was widely discussed and prompted responses from world leaders. On the 2nd of August, 2023, Goldberg was named the tenth moderator of the PBS program Washington Week, and the magazine entered an editorial partnership with the show.

• 5. Ownership and the Move to Washington

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  Ellery Sedgwick purchased the magazine in 1908 and kept it in Boston. In 1980, property magnate Mortimer Zuckerman acquired it and became chairman. On the 27th of September, 1999, Zuckerman transferred ownership to David G. Bradley, who ran the National Journal Group and was focused on Washington, D.C. Bradley promised the magazine would stay in Boston for the foreseeable future, and it did for the next five-and-a-half years. In April 2005, he announced the editorial offices would move from their longtime address at 77 North Washington Street in Boston to Washington, D.C. Bradley told The New York Observer the move was not about cost-cutting; near-term savings of $200,000-$300,000 would be swallowed by severance spending. He wanted to create a hub where the top minds across Atlantic Media Company could collaborate. Few Boston staff agreed to relocate. Bradley conducted an open search for a new editorial team, hiring James Bennet, who had been the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times, as editor-in-chief in 2006. On the 28th of July, 2017, Bradley sold a majority interest to Laurene Powell Jobs through her Emerson Collective organization, with Peter Lattman of Emerson Collective immediately named vice chairman.

• 6. Political Stands

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  Three years into publication, in 1860, editor James Russell Lowell used the magazine to endorse Republican Abraham Lincoln for president and to argue for the abolition of slavery. The editorial board did not take another presidential endorsement stance for more than a century. In 1964, Edward Weeks wrote on behalf of the board to endorse Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson and rebuke Republican Barry Goldwater. The third endorsement in the magazine's history came in 2016, when the board urged readers to support Hillary Clinton and reject Donald Trump's candidacy. After Trump won that election, the magazine became a pointed critic of his presidency. A March 2019 cover article by editor Yoni Appelbaum called directly for Trump's impeachment. In September 2020, the magazine published a story citing anonymous sources reporting that Trump had referred to dead American soldiers as "losers." The magazine endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in October 2024. In early 2024, it published a special 24-article issue titled "If Trump Wins," warning about a potential second term. Then, in 2025, national-security leaders in the Trump administration accidentally added editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat in which they planned military strikes on the Houthis.

• 7. Digital Reinvention and Controversy

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  The Atlantic went online with AOL in 1993 and launched an independent website in 1995. It dropped its paywall for subscribers in January 2008, a move tied to a sponsorship from Goldman Sachs; web traffic to its properties rose roughly 2,500% in the years that followed. In 2005, the magazine and the Aspen Institute launched the Aspen Ideas Festival, a ten-day event in Aspen, Colorado, featuring 350 presenters, 200 sessions, and 3,000 attendees each year. In September 2011, The Atlantic launched CityLab, a separate website co-founded with urban theorist and professor Richard Florida. In December 2019, Atlantic Media sold CityLab to Bloomberg Media, which laid off half the staff before relaunching it in June 2020. The magazine's digital history includes a notable failure: on the 14th of January, 2013, it published sponsor content promoting David Miscavige, leader of the Church of Scientology, with comments moderated by a marketing team that removed criticism of the church. The piece was taken down and an apology issued the same day. In November 2020, the magazine retracted a story after a Washington Post inquiry and published an 800-word editor's note questioning the author's credibility. That author, Ruth Shalit Barrett, sued for defamation; after mediation, a settlement was reached in June 2025, with The New York Times reporting The Atlantic agreed to pay her more than $1 million.

• 8. The Subscribers and the Future

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  In 2016, the American Society of Magazine Editors named The Atlantic its Magazine of the Year. Writers at the publication won Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing in 2022, and the magazine won the general excellence award from the same organization in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Former Wired editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson became CEO in December 2020. By 2024, the magazine had crossed one million subscribers and turned profitable, a striking reversal from a single year in which it lost $20 million and laid off 17% of its staff. A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that 62% of The Atlantic's audience held at least a bachelor's degree, the highest proportion among the 30 major U.S. news outlets examined. In 2024, the magazine announced it would resume monthly publishing in 2025, returning to a cadence it had abandoned more than two decades earlier.