The Atlantic

The Atlantic

December 2007 issue of The Atlantic.
Editor	James Bennet
Categories	literature, political science, foreign affairs
Frequency	10 per year
Circulation	400,000
Publisher	Atlantic Media Company
First issue	1857
Country	United States
Language	American English
Website	www.theatlantic.com
ISSN	1072-7825

The Atlantic is an American magazine founded (as The Atlantic Monthly) in Boston in 1857. Originally created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine, its current format is of a general editorial magazine. Written with content focusing on "foreign affairs, politics, and the economy [as well as] cultural trends," it is primarily aimed at a target audience of "thought leaders."^[1][2]

The magazine's founders were a group of writers that included Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell (who would become its first editor). The current CEO and group publisher is John Fox Sullivan,^[3] while the editor-in-chief as of 2006 is James Bennet.

Format and periodicalism

Originally a monthly publication, the magazine, subscribed to by 400,000 readers, now publishes ten times a year^[4] and features articles in the fields of political science and foreign affairs, as well as book reviews. In April, 2005, the editors of The Atlantic decided to cease publishing fiction in regular issues in favor of a newsstand-only annual fiction issue edited by longtime staffer C. Michael Curtis. On January 22, 2008, TheAtlantic.com dropped its subscriber wall and allowed users to freely browse its site, including all past archives.^[5] In March 2009, TheAtlantic.com added a food channel edited by Corby Kummer and with contributions from Grant Achatz, Tim and Nina Zagat and even Ezekiel J. Emanuel, among others.

Literary history

First publication of "Battle Hymn of the Republic"

The Atlantic was the first to publish Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" (on February 1, 1862), and William Parker's "The Freedman's Story" (in February and March 1866). It published Charles W. Eliot's "The New Education" (a call for practical reform) that resulted in his appointment to Presidency of Harvard University in 1869. It also published some of Charles Chesnutt's tales before they were collected for The Conjure Woman. The associative vision As We May Think by Vannevar Bush appeared in July 1945. The magazine published Martin Luther King, Jr.'s defense of civil disobedience in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in August 1963. The magazine was a point of connection between Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson; having read an article in the Atlantic by Higginson, Dickinson asked him to become her mentor. It has also published many of the works of Mark Twain, including one that managed to escape publication until 2001. Among its best known current writers are James Fallows, Mark Bowden, Caitlin Flanagan, Jeffrey Goldberg, Joshua Green, Christopher Hitchens, Jeffrey Tayler, Robert D. Kaplan, Corby Kummer, and Andrew Sullivan.

The magazine has also published speculative articles that inspired the development of whole new technologies. The classic example is the publication of Vannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think" in July 1945, which inspired Douglas Engelbart and later Ted Nelson to develop the modern workstation and hypertext technology.

Ownership

For all but its recent existence, The Atlantic has been known as a distinctively New England literary magazine (as opposed to Harper's and later The New Yorker, both from New York), and by its third year was published by the famous Boston publishing house of Ticknor and Fields (later to become part of Houghton Mifflin). The magazine was purchased by its then editor, Ellery Sedgwick, during World War I, but remained in Boston.

In 1980, the magazine was acquired by Mortimer Zuckerman, property magnate and founder of Boston Properties, who became its Chairman.

On September 27, 1999, ownership of the magazine was transferred from Zuckerman to David G. Bradley, owner of the beltway news-focused National Journal Group. Although Bradley had promised that no major changes were in store, the magazine's publishers announced in April 2005 that the editorial offices would leave their long-time home at 77 North Washington St. in Boston to join the company's advertising and circulation divisions in Washington, D.C. apparently due to the high cost of Boston real estate.^[6] Later, in August, Bradley told the New York Observer, cost cutting from the move would amount to a minor $200,000–$300,000 and those savings would be swallowed by severance related spending. The reason, then, was to create a hub in Washington where the top minds from all of Bradley's publications could collaborate. Few of the Boston staff agreed to relocate, allowing Bradley to embark on an open search for a new editorial staff.^[7]

Bradley, who described himself in 2007 as "a neocon guy" with an open mind,^[8] hired the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times James Bennet as editor, and writers including Jeffrey Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan^[8].

The Art Department comprises Jason Treat, Art Director; Melissa Bluey, Assistant Art Director and Katie Mathy, Art and Photography Coordinator.

List of editors

The cover of the original issue of The Atlantic, November 1, 1857.

• James Russell Lowell, 1857–1861
• James Thomas Fields, 1861–1871
• William Dean Howells, 1871–1881
• Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 1881–1890
• Horace Elisha Scudder, 1890–1898
• Walter Hines Page, 1898–1899
• Bliss Perry, 1899–1909
• Ellery Sedgwick, 1909–1938
• Edward A. Weeks, 1938–1966
• Robert Manning, 1966–1980
• William Whitworth, 1980–1999
• Michael Kelly, 1999–2003
• Cullen Murphy, interim editor, never named editor-in-chief, 2003–2006
• James Bennet, 2006–

References

External links

• The Atlantic Online
• A History of The Atlantic
• Atlantic archival writings by topic
• Online archive of Atlantic (earliest issues up to December 1901)
• The American Idea: The Best of The Atlantic Monthly
• The Atlantic issues at Project Gutenberg