Across six decades as an Atlantic editor and a teacher, C. Michael Curtis discovered and nurtured multiple generations of American writers.
Milton Gendel’s archive offers an acute vision of 20th-century Rome—from a distinctly American perspective.
Half a century ago, the British government forcibly removed 2,000 people from a remote string of islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. They’ve never stopped struggling to return.
The country wanted modern prosperity and traditional values. It could only have one.
What China Miéville’s The City & the City tells us about the state of the nation
History suggests that corrosive change can be hard to see while it’s happening.
Donald Trump was America’s first stateless president.
A modest proposal for building the president a bubble of denial, so the rest of us can get on with our lives
An oral history of the craziest presidential election in modern history
Alaric the Goth wanted to be part of the empire. Instead he helped bring it down.
On the occasion of this year’s Hitchens Prize, a look back at tributes to Christopher Hitchens by Atlantic writers at the time of his death
It’s easy to forget how unforeseeable the “unforeseeable” really is.
His racism and intolerance have always been in evidence; only slowly did he begin to understand how to use them to his advantage.
Richard Todd was an editor at The Atlantic in the 1970s and ’80s. He died in April.
Twenty years ago, Bill Clinton became the first president to be impeached since Andrew Johnson, in 1868. We offer a recounting by people who played a role.
A cache of letters sheds light on the final days of a Nazi holed up in Italy after World War II.
The conflicts change, but the factors influencing the quality of the coverage—including ignorance, confusion, and competition—stay consistent.
The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.
In the footsteps of the last Roman emperor
Highlights of a “Fall of Rome Tour”