Preserving America’s Thought Leader Magazines

Abstract

America’s “general interest” magazine originated in Boston. Founded in 1857, The Atlantic was created as a “journal of literature, politics, science, and the arts.” Its founders included Francis H. Underwood and prominent writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier, with James Russell Lowell as the first editor. Lowell’s model became the norm. As The Atlantic described it, “Lowell unswervingly trained his attention on American writers, providing a home both for the younger American talents, whom he cultivated, and for the established ones.”