The story
Founding and initial growth
In the autumn of 1857, Moses Dresser Phillips, a publisher from Boston, created The Atlantic Monthly. The plan for the magazine was launched at a dinner party at the Parker House Hotel in Boston, which was described in a letter by Phillips:
I must tell you about a little dinner-party I gave about two weeks ago. It would be proper, perhaps, to state the origin of it was a desire to confer with my literary friends on a somewhat extensive literary project, the particulars of which I shall reserve till you come. But to the Party: My invitations included only R. W. Emerson, H. W. Longfellow, J. R. Lowell, Mr. Motley (the 'Dutch Republic' man), O. W. Holmes, Mr. Cabot, and Mr. Underwood, our literary man. Imagine your uncle as the head of such a table, with such guests. The above named were the only ones invited, and they were all present. We sat down at three P.M., and rose at eight. The time occupied was longer by about four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of consuming in that kind of occupation, but it was the richest time intellectually by all odds that I have ever had. Leaving myself and 'literary man' out of the group, I think you will agree with me that it would be difficult to duplicate that number of such conceded scholarship in the whole country besides... Each one is known alike on both sides of the Atlantic, and is read beyond the limits of the English language.
At that dinner he announced his idea for the magazine:
Mr. Cabot is much wiser than I am. Dr. Holmes can write funnier verses than I can. Mr. Motley can write history better than I. Mr. Emerson is a philosopher and I am not. Mr. Lowell knows more of the old poets than I. But none of you knows the American people as well as I do.
The magazine's founders included Francis H. Underwood and prominent writers W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier. James Russell Lowell was its first editor. Stowe was invited to the dinner party but declined because it served alcohol; nevertheless she signed the manifesto that set out the goals of the paper along with Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and The Atlantic today credits her as one of its founders.
The Atlantic's first issue was published in November 1857. By its third year, it was published by Boston publishing house Ticknor and Fields, which later became part of Houghton Mifflin. In 1878, the magazine absorbed The Galaxy, a competitor monthly magazine founded a dozen years previously by William Conant Church and his brother Francis P. Church; it had published works by Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Ion Hanford Perdicaris and Henry James. In 1879, The Atlantic had offices in Winthrop Square in Boston and at 21 Astor Place in New York City. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the magazine also published the annual The Atlantic Monthly Almanac.
20th century
The magazine was purchased in 1908 by then-editor Ellery Sedgwick and remained in Boston. The Atlantic Monthly Press was founded in 1917; for many years, it was operated in partnership with Little, Brown and Company. Its published books included Drums Along the Mohawk (1936) and Blue Highways (1982). The press was sold in 1986; today it is an imprint of Grove Atlantic.
In 1980, the magazine was acquired by Mortimer Zuckerman, property magnate and founder of Boston Properties, who became its chairman. On September 27, 1999, Zuckerman transferred ownership of the magazine to David G. Bradley, owner of the National Journal Group, which focused on Washington, D.C., and federal government news. Bradley had promised that the magazine would stay in Boston for the foreseeable future, as it did for the next five-and-a-half years.
Read the full text
21st century
In April 2005, the publishers announced that the editorial offices would be moved from their longtime home at 77 North Washington Street in Boston to join the company's advertising and circulation divisions in Washington, D.C. Later in August, Bradley told The New York Observer that the move was not made to save money—near-term savings would be $200,000–$300,000, a relatively small amount that would be swallowed by severance-related spending—but instead would serve to create a hub in Washington, D.C., where the top minds from all of Bradley's publications could collaborate under the Atlantic Media Company umbrella. Few of the Boston staff agreed to move, and Bradley then commenced an open search for a new editorial staff.
In 2006, Bradley hired James Bennet, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times, as editor-in-chief. Bradley also hired Jeffrey Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan as writers for the magazine. In 2008, Jay Lauf joined the organization as publisher and vice-president; as of 2017, he was publisher and president of Quartz. In early 2014, Bennet and Bob Cohn became co-presidents of The Atlantic, and Cohn became the publication's sole president in March 2016 when Bennet was tapped to lead The New York Times's editorial page. Jeffrey Goldberg was named editor-in-chief in October 2016.
On July 28, 2017, The Atlantic announced that Laurene Powell Jobs had acquired majority ownership through her Emerson Collective organization, with a staff member of Emerson Collective, Peter Lattman, being immediately named as vice chairman of The Atlantic. David G. Bradley and Atlantic Media retained a minority share position in this sale. In May 2019, technology journalist Adrienne LaFrance became executive editor. In December 2020, former Wired editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson was named CEO.
In 2022, The Atlantic moved its offices to The Wharf in Washington, D.C.'s Southwest Waterfront neighborhood.
From Wikipedia’s article on The Atlantic, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5