160 Years of the American Idea

A collection of articles from every year of The Atlantic’s history traces the evolution of the magazine, and of America.

When Einstein Warned the World

Seventy years ago, Albert Einstein presaged atomic war.

America's Most Widely Misread Literary Work

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” originally published in The Atlantic in 1915, is animated in a new video.

The Double-Consciousness of a Dark Body

An animated excerpt of an article from W.E.B. Du Bois depicts the “double-consciousness of a dark body.”

This Is Helen Keller’s 1932 'Modern Woman'

In 1932, Hellen Keller offered some advice for the “perplexed businessman.”

On Turning 160

The Atlantic was first published in November of 1857. Its 160^th anniversary calls for a celebration.

My President Was Black

A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next

The Obama Doctrine

The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world.

What ISIS Really Wants

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

The Case for Reparations

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

The Killing Machines

How to think about drones

Can the Middle Class Be Saved?

The Great Recession has accelerated the hollowing-out of the American middle class. And it has illuminated the widening divide between most of America and the super-rich. Both developments herald grave consequences. Here is how we can bridge the gap between us.

The End of White America?

The election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

What the Internet is doing to our brains

The Rove Presidency

Karl Rove had the plan, the power, and the historic chance to remake American politics. What went wrong?

How Do I Love Thee?

A growing number of Internet dating sites are relying on academic researchers to develop a new science of attraction. A firsthand report from the front lines of an unprecedented social experiment

North Korea: The War Game

Dealing with North Korea could make Iraq look like child's play—and the longer we wait, the harder it will get. That's the message of a Pentagon-style war game involving some of this country's most prominent foreign-policy strategists

Welcome to the Green Zone

The American bubble in Baghdad

The Logic of Suicide Terrorism

First you feel nervous about riding the bus. Then you wonder about going to a mall. Then you think twice about sitting for long at your favorite café. Then nowhere seems safe. Terrorist groups have a strategy—to shrink to nothing the areas in which people move freely—and suicide bombers, inexpensive and reliably lethal, are their latest weapons. Israel has learned to recognize and disrupt the steps on the path to suicide attacks. We must learn too.

The Fifty-First State?

Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq's borders—and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship?

One Nation, Slightly Divisible

The electoral map of the 2000 presidential race became famous: big blocks of red (denoting states that went for Bush) stretched across the heartland, with brackets of blue (denoting states for Gore) along the coasts. Our Blue America correspondent has ventured repeatedly into Red territory. He asks the question—after September 11, a pressing one—Do our differences effectively split us into two nations, or are they just cracks in a still-united whole?

An Acquired Taste

Al Gore is the most lethal debater in politics, a ruthless combatant who will say whatever it takes to win, and who leaves opponents not just beaten but brutalized. But Gore is no natural-born killer. He studied hard to become the man he is today.

When They Get Out

How prisons, established to fight crime, produce crime.

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

The sensational revelations of recent years about the Central Intelligence Agency almost obscure a larger point: The Agency is just no good at what it's supposed to be doing. So writes the author, a former CIA officer, who describes a corrosive culture in which promotion-hungry operatives collect pointless intelligence from worthless foreign agents. Reform, the author warns, may be impossible.

Was Democracy Just a Moment?

The global triumph of democracy was to be the glorious climax of the American Century. But democracy may not be the system that will best serve the world—or even the one that will prevail in places that now consider themselves bastions of freedom.

Why Americans Hate the Media

Why has the media establishment become so unpopular? Perhaps the public has good reason to think that the media's self-aggrandizement gets in the way of solving the country's real problems.

In the Strawberry Fields

The management of California's strawberry industry offers a case study of both the dependence on an imported peasantry that characterizes much of American agriculture and the destructive consequences of a deliberate low-wage economy.

The Wild East

Organized crime has Russia even more firmly in its grip than has been reported. Lawlessness has made Americans in Moscow fear for their lives, thrown obstacles in the way of businesses both foreign and domestic——and eroded the government's control over its nuclear weapons and materials.

The Story of a Gun

After 60,000 deaths from firearms use over the past two years, America is in a gun crisis. Yet gun laws remain weak, gunmakers continue to promote killing power, and gun dealers accept no responsibility for the criminal use of what they sell.

Crashing the Locker Room

Why are there so few women in Congress? Why is it especially difficult for women to make it to the Senate? With a record number of women running for the Senate this year, our reporter takes a careful look at the obstacles in the way of women candidates and at their emerging advantages.

Waiting for the Weekend

A whole two days off from work, in which we can do what we please, has only recently become a near-universal right. What we choose to do looks increasingly like work, and idleness has acquired a bad name. Herein, a history of leisure.

What Kind of Democracy?

At a time when citizens in Eastern Europe and elsewhere were demanding the right to self-determination and converting their governments to democracies, a social scientist considered the degree to which civil liberties within a democracy require protection.

Ethics and Animals

"Suppose, just suppose, that the Animal Welfare Act were replaced by an animal-rights act, which would prohibit the use by human beings of any animals to their detriment. What would be the effect on medical research, education, and product testing?"  

Picasso: Creator and Destroyer

Picasso's art enacted the violent passions and twisted energies of the twentieth century. So did his life.

Living With Fallout

An American abroad in Chernobyl's aftermath confronts the half-life of truth

Thinking About Terrorism

Two stereotypes dominate discussions of terrorism. They cloud thought and inhibit effective action.

The Ordeal of Afghanistan

An overview of the history and geopolitical significance of the Soviet invasion and occupation  

Coercion in the Classroom Won't Work

Learning by doing and sensitivity to feelings are the keys to academic progress

The Pardon

Nixon, Ford, Haig, and the transfer of power.

Broken Windows

The police and neighborhood safety

The Education of David Stockman

“None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”

Not Being There

“Television is poised to absorb and emasculate the movies, all in the name of home entertainment.”

Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks

“The evidence, fragmentary as it is, suggests that the CIA customarily drew the line at what is commonly meant by the word ‘murder.’ However, in the late 1950s, the CIA began to get orders to kill people.”

Soldiers of Misfortune

A report on the veterans of Vietnam—and on the often disgraceful treatment they have received from their countrymen.

Life on Mars

Space scientists won't say so, but the results of three brilliantly conceived experiments lead inevitably to one startling conclusion: Life, in some form, exists on Mars.

CBS: The Power and the Profits

However the Toynbee or the Gibbon of the future adjudges what happened to American society, he will need to reckon large with the impact of radio and television.

The Man Who Runs the Senate

Robert Byrd, a little-known, fiddle-playing West Virginian, is the Senate’s Democratic whip, probably its next majority leader, and just possibly a favorite son at the 1976 Democratic Convention. Says he: “I believe that a big man can make a small job important.” Some of his colleagues think Byrd also proves the converse: that big job can help a small man to grow.

Burning Up People to Make Electricity

In Harlan County, Kentucky, are some of our country's richest natural resources—and some of its poorest people.

The Runaway Presidency

As a steady stream of disturbing revelations surfaced in the Watergate investigation, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.—a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a former adviser to President Kennedy—argued that under Richard Nixon's insidious influence, the power of the presidency had spiraled out of control.

The Pentagon Papers Trial

“Inevitably political, the Pentagon Papers case is a decisive test of the federal government's capacity to control the disclosure of information stamped 'secret,' of an individual's right to defy the security classification system, and at least peripherally, of the press's ability to rely on 'leaks' in government circles.”

Moving Toward the Clonal Man

Is this what we want?

Job Discrimination and What Women Can Do About It

“More women will have to become much more aggressive than they are at present if equal opportunity in employment is to be achieved.”

Chicago's Blackstone Rangers (Part I)

Are the Blackstone Rangers a corrupt, exploitive street gang? Or a constructive engine of community black power?

How Could Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy

From the beginning of John Kennedy's Administration into this fifth year of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, substantially the same small group of men have presided over the destiny of the United States. In that time they have carried the country from a limited involvement in Vietnam into a war that is brutal, probably unwinnable, and, to an increasing body of opinion, calamitous and immoral. How could it happen?

Death at an Early Age

Countless sociological studies and official reports have described the dreadful condition of the nation's ghetto schools in abstract terms, but the general public has no concrete idea of what goes on inside them. Jonathan Kozol recounts his experience as a teacher in the Roxbury section of Boston.

The Great Marijuana Hoax

“I've never had a chance to explain my position on this subject without interruption, and to a large audience. So people mistakenly think I'm asking people to take dope-fiend dope.”

One Woman's Abortion

In 1965, an anonymous woman described the steps she took to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

The 1964 Election

“In the election this fall ... we stand for the election of President Lyndon B. Johnson.”

Why Land on the Moon?

Six years before the first Apollo mission, two scientists from NASA argued for manned lunar exploration.

The Baleful Influence of Gambling

“The housewife, the factory worker, and the businessman will tell you that they are against such things as narcotics, bootlegging, prostitution, gang murders, the corruption of public officials and police, and, the bribery of college athletes. And yet this is where their money goes.”

What Has Happened to The American Dream?

In 1961, Eleanor Roosevelt called for Americans to rededicate themselves to the country's democratic ideals.

For the Union Dead

A poem

Sex and the College Girl

“I think that the charge that men have become emasculated by the competence of women is both depressing and untrue.”

The Lesson of Iraq

“Let us not forget that our essential policy interests are identical with those of the Arabs.”

Science: Careers for Women

The growing need for research workers and scientists has opened new doors for women. Helen Hill Miller, who for many years was Washington correspondent for the London Economist, describes some of the work being done in science both by single women and by those who successfully combine marriage and a career.

High Hurdles and White Gloves

The first modern Olympic games took place in Athens sixty years ago in a stadium holding seventy-five thousand. The American hurdler Thomas P. Curtis won the Gold Medal in his event; he also found time to make notes of what happened.

The Control of Energy

One pound of uranium carries more releasable energy than 1500 tons of coal, and the solar energy that reaches the earth in a single day is equivalent to that released by two million Hiroshima A-bombs. Better control of these and other forms of energy is basic to man's progress.

New England and the South

“The southward migration of industry from New England has too frequently taken place for causes other than normal competition and natural advantages.”  

Our Mistakes in Korea

“The deliberate political design by which two Administrations treated the Korean War as if it were an insoluble military problem … confused the American public and, confusing it, dulled its memory.”

News and the Whole Truth

“Too much of our news is one-dimensional, when truth has three dimensions (or maybe more); and in some fields the vast and increasing complexity of the news makes it continually more difficult—especially for us Washington reporters—to tell the public what really happened.”  

The Future of Man

Bertrand Russell calmly examines three foreseeable possibilities for the human race.

Miracle at Kitty Hawk: Unpublished Letters of the Wright Brothers (Part I)

“It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill. This I conceive to be fortunate, for man, by reason of his greater intellect, can more reasonably hope to equal birds in knowledge than to equal nature in the perfection of her machinery.”

The Open Mind

The former head of the Manhattan Project wrote about how to advance peace in the nuclear age, just four years after he directed the construction of the world’s first atomic bomb.

Death of a Pig

“I just wanted to keep on raising a pig, full meal after full meal, spring into summer into fall.”

Atomic War or Peace

Seventy years ago, Einstein offered the United States and the international community advice on how to coexist in the shadow of the bomb.

Loot for the Master Race

“Göring resorted to every conceivable device to fill the walls and the coffers of Carinhall, bargaining, cheating, even invoking where necessary the prestige of German arms or the terrible threat of intervention by the Gestapo.”

As We May Think

“Consider a future device …  in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

How Bad is the Flu?

“The possibility of recurrent epidemics, perhaps of increasing virulence, even of another pandemic, must be faced.”

The Education of a Queen

Princess Elizabeth will be eighteen on her next birthday. How does her education compare with that of an American girl of the same age? And how does it compare with that of Victoria, who was also educated to be queen?

China Emergent

In the midst of World War II, as China's Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, struggled against Japanese invaders from without and the Communist movement from within, his Wellesley College–educated wife decried the exploitation of China by the West and delineated a vision for a more democratic future.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: Part I

In 1937, Rebecca West set out to see for herself why the "Powderkeg of Europe" had so often threatened the fate of the continent.

We Stand Here

Two Yale students defend their isolationism.

Concentration Camp

“Men ... are brought, for the 'protection of the people and the State,' into a concentration camp without hearing, without court sentence, without the possibility of redress, and for an indefinite time.”

Love in America

“It is as if the experience of being in love could only be one of two things: a superhuman ecstasy, the way of reaching heaven on earth and in pairs; or a psychopathic condition to be treated by specialists.”

Hitler Looks Eastward

Two years before Hitler invaded Poland, an Atlantic author predicted the Reich’s expansion and how it would affect the various nations of Eastern Europe.

Letters From the Dust Bowl

When drought struck Oklahoma in the 1930s, the author and her husband stayed behind to protect their 28-year-old farm. Her letters to a friend paint a picture of dire poverty, desiccated soil, and long days with no sunshine.

Swastika

“National Socialism is not only a protest against the Treaty of Versailles. It is a revolt against the ideals of democracy.”

The Roosevelt Experiment

“The Roosevelt experiment, in a word, is a systematic effort to put capitalism into leading strings of principle. It is to be the servant, and not the master, of the American people.”

Confessions of a Novelist

"What I mean to try for is the observation of that strange moment when the vaguely adumbrated characters whose adventures one is preparing to record are suddenly there, themselves, in the flesh, in possession of one, and in command of one’s voice and hand."

Put Your Husband in the Kitchen

“I am tempted to think that the perplexed businessman might discover a possible solution of his troubles if he would just spend a few days in his wife's kitchen.”

Whirlwinds of Speculation

“The pouring forth of this great torrent of new units of speculation results in the inevitable consequences dictated by the law of supply and demand.”

State Pensions or Charity?

“It is time for us to devise ways of meeting the inevitable disaster of old age and the almost equally inevitable disasters of sickness and unemployment, and these must be ways that will not fail when the stock market breaks or a new machine is invented, that will function in the lean years as in the fat years, and that can be accepted without loss of self-respect.”

‘Inside Information’

“Securities in corporations whose directors are known to be trading in and out of the stock on special information for their own personal profit are coming more and more to be looked upon askance by investors.”

Gangs

"People called them hoodlums, and hoodlums they were, but they were a gusty element in community life, noisy and forceful."

Catholic and Patriot: Governor Smith Replies

“I recognize no power in the institutions of my Church to interfere with the operations of the Constitution of the United States or the enforcement of the law of the land.”

Stop, Look, Listen! The Shareholder's Right to Adequate Information

Just a few years before the Crash of 1929, Harvard economics professor William Z. Ripley warned that corporations weren't providing accurate financial information to their investors and argued that a framework of regulatory oversight was needed. The creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934 has been in part attributed to Ripley's Atlantic writings.

The Bear Hunt: An Original Ballad Never Before Printed

Light verse composed by America's sixteenth president

The Modern View of Evolution

“Evolution makes its appeal to reason, but its acceptance does not mean the abasement, let alone the denial, of emotion, faith, and religion.”

In China, Too

Pearl S. Buck, an American-born writer who was raised in China and continues to live and teach there with her husband, reflects on the social and cultural changes transforming China's young people.

Jazz: A Musical Discussion

“As a state of mind, [it] is symptom, not malady.”

Relativity and the Absurdities of Alice

“Since 1913, a number of gentlemen wearing glasses and looking wondrous wise, and no doubt as wise as they look, have proved to us that it can always be teatime if we care to figure it out properly.”

Prison Cruelty

“The prison cannot be changed as long as the old basis of suppression and isolation is maintained.”

The Idea of a League of Nations

"What has happened is essentially this, that the natural limitations upon warfare which have existed hitherto appear to have broken down."

Revolutionary Justice

“I felt like Alice in Wonderland. I had swallowed a magic pill which had transformed things. Cooks and duchesses; ragged soldiers and resplendent generals; collarless workingmen and bewigged and begowned judges, had changed places.”

The Threatened Eclipse of Free Speech

“When we start out to kill enemies abroad on a gigantic scale, we are not likely to hesitate to gag those at home who seem directly or indirectly to sympathize with the foe.”

The Nation's Crime Against the Individual

“The modern soldier's hope of finding some universal values and transcendent principles involved in his nation’s struggle and hallowing it, is more certain of disappointment than ever before.”

A Group of Poems

"Birches," "The Road Not Taken," and "The Sound of Trees"

Some Confessions of a ‘T.B.’

“There is no walk of life which we have left entirely uninvaded. We are everywhere, in everything. If a climax is desired, even the throne has no immunity from our adventurous and versatile persistence in attempting occupations.”

A Plea for the Recognition of the Chinese Republic

About a year after the revolutionary overthrow of the Qing Dynasty, Ching Chun Wang, a Chinese railway official and representative of the emergent republic, makes a case for international recognition.

The Lawrence Strike: A Study

“At present there probably cannot be a judicial presentation of the case; time is needed to put events in true relation to causes. But it is possible to correct some falsities and relieve some perplexities regarding essential facts.”

Why I Came to America

“’We live in a land of strangers, where there is no soil for the seeds of our activity to find roots. Remember, David, we are strangers!’”

A Fixed Idea

A poem

The Heart of the Race Problem

“The problem, How to maintain the institution of chattel slavery, ceased to be at Appomattox; the problem, How to maintain the social, industrial, and civic inferiority of the descendants of chattel slaves, succeeded it, and is the race problem of the South at the present time. There is no other.”

What It Means to Be an Enfranchised Woman

“The vote is an indefinable something that makes you part of the plan of the world. It means the same to women that it does to men.”

Politics (1857-1907)

“The process by which a nation was created and unified came at last to an end, and a still more fateful process began which was to determine its place and example in the general history of the world.”

New York After Paris

"New York is trying to create for itself a new mind as well as a new body."

Village Improvement

"'Will it be beautiful?' should be asked as to any proposition for improvement, but it is not by any means the first question to be asked."

An American Primer

“These States are rapidly supplying themselves with new words, called for by new occasions, new facts, new politics, new combinations.”

The Negro in the Regular Army

“The sterling characteristics of the colored soldiers, their loyalty to the service as shown by the statistics of desertion, and, above all, their splendid service in Cuba, should have entitled them to additional organizations.”

The Disarmament Trust

A New York Times editor spins a fable in which banking giant J.P. Morgan strikes a deal for world peace.

The Freedmen's Bureau

“No sooner had Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the earth, — What shall be done with slaves?”

The Independence of the Executive (Part I)

In an address to Princeton University, America’s 22nd and 24th president spoke about the history and political deliberations surrounding his former office.

The Yosemite National Park

“All the world lies warm in one heart, yet the Sierra seems to get more light than other mountains.”

The Dreyfus and Zola Trials

“For the French nation, the point of interest has been, not the treason, but the Jew.”

Strivings of the Negro People

“It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”

The Awakening of the Negro

“It is through the dairy farm, the truck garden, the trades, and commercial life, largely, that the negro is to find his way to the enjoyment of all his rights.”

Mars (Part I)

The first in a four-part series about the planet’s physical conditions—and its possible habitation.

The Railway War

“It is idle to suppose that organized labor has been crushed, or that it will permanently submit to defeat. It is only a question of time when another outbreak will occur ... accompanied with violence, bloodshed, and fire.”

The Hayes-Tilden Electoral Commission

How Congress settled the disputed electoral count in the presidential election of 1876

Political Assessments in the Coming Campaign

“The clerk is bound to feel that there is some duress in the matter, when a committee of the association with which his immediate superior is closely connected requests him for campaign funds. He ought to be allowed to contribute or not, just as he sees fit.”

Emily Dickinson's Letters

“‘Mr. Higginson, — Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?’”

The United States Looking Outward

“Our self-imposed isolation in the matter of markets ... [has] coincided singularly with an actual remoteness of this continent from the life of the rest of the world.”

The New Talking Machines

A noted architect and writer commends Thomas Edison for his progress in developing the phonograph and predicts great things for its future.

Studies of Factory Life: The Village System

The first installment in a four-part series on American cotton manufacturing

The Red Cross

“The Red Cross [is] destined to become the great almoner of the people’s bounty on occasions of swift calamity, the tried and trusted agent of national and international benefactions.”

Responsible Government Under the Constitution

“The question is not merely, How shall the methods of Congress be clarified and its ways made purposeful and responsible? There is this greater question at stake: How shall the essential arrangements of the Constitution be preserved?”

Some Testimony in the Case

Conversations with Southerners about race relations and life in the aftermath of the Civil War

The Red Sunsets

“When this volcanic dust ceases to glorify our skies at dawn and eve, we shall part with what has probably been the most remarkable and picturesque accident to the earth's physical life that has been known with the limits of recorded history.”

Colonialism in the United States

“We alone can use properly our own resources; and no work in art or literature ever has been, or ever will be, of any real or lasting value which is not true, original, and independent.”

Some Traits of Bismarck

He “fought out the battles of his generation with ‘blood and iron, not with parliamentary speeches;’ and restored the medieval brigands to the place which had so long been usurped by a race of dyspeptic philosophers.”

The Story of a Great Monopoly

”These incidents in railroad history show most of the points where we fail ... to maintain the equities of ‘government’—and employment—‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’”

The Portrait of a Lady

The opening scenes of Henry James’s classic novel

The Future of Invention

“Everywhere we meet with the same state of facts. The labor-saving machine is entering every field, and its entrance is to the workman an irresistible command to go.”

The Result in South Carolina

An anonymous contributor described mounting racial tensions in the aftermath of Reconstruction.

A Century of Congress

A year after the national centennial, a long-time member of the House of Representatives and future president of the United States reflected on the development of the American legislature.

Lincoln's Plans of Reconstruction

“Here were no humiliating terms of submission imposed on a brave people: no amnesty qualifications exacted; no banishment or confiscation laws; no test-oaths, to incite to perjury or foster the resentments of war.”

Is Marriage Holy?

“What attitude of mind does a perception of the inward holiness or religious sanctity of marriage enjoin upon those who suffer from any of the offenses included in the violation of the outward bond? — a vindictive attitude or a forgiving one?”

A Rebel's Recollections (Part 1)

A confederate soldier from a plantation-owning family offers the Southern point of view on the Civil War.

The Art of Being President

Gathered from the experiences of Thomas Jefferson

John Brown and His Friends

How a coterie of New Englanders—including the author—secretly funded John Brown's raid

Werewolves and Swan-maidens

“The mediæval belief in werewolves is especially adapted to illustrate the complicated manner in which divers mythical conceptions and misunderstood natural occurrences will combine to generate a long-enduring superstition.”

The English Governess at the Siamese Court

The author recounts her adventures with the King of Siam.

The True Story of Lady Byron's Life

Lady Byron has not spoken at all; her story has never been told.

George Silverman’s Explanation

A short story

An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage

“Statesmen, beware what you do. The destiny of unborn and unnumbered generations is in your hands.”

The Freedman’s Story

An escaped slave tells his story—including his account of his violent showdown with slave-catchers in Pennsylvania.

The Place of Abraham Lincoln in History

“We think we pay the best tribute to his memory and the most fitting respect to his name, if we ask after the relation in which he stands to the history of his country and his fellow-man.”

Among the Mormons

A nineteenth-century writer meets Brigham Young and explores the “City of Saints.”

The Brothers

Set in a wartime hospital, and narrated by a Civil War nurse, Louisa May Alcott's 1863 short story is a tale of siblings—one black, one white.

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

The lyrics to Julia Ward Howe’s patriotic classic premiered in the February 1862 issue of The Atlantic.

The Pickens-and-Stealin's Rebellion

“We must convince men that treason against the ballot-box is as dangerous as treason against a throne.”

The Election in November

The Atlantic’s editor endorsed Abraham Lincoln for the presidency in the 1860 election, correctly predicting it would prove to be “a turning-point in our history.”

Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?

"We venture to assert, then, that woman’s social inferiority, in the past, has been, to a great extent, a legitimate thing."

Review of the Kansas Usurpation

“It was scarcely opened, before it became, as might have been expected, the battleground for the opposing civilizations of the Union, to renew and fight out their long quarrel upon. From every quarter of the land settlers rushed thither, to take part in the wager of battle.”

Where Will It End?

In its second issue, The Atlantic urged Northerners to take a stand against slavery.