Birthplace of a Magazine

t the end of 2005, The Atlantic Monthly will move from Boston to Washington, D.C.—commencing a new chapter in its history. As the magazine looks ahead to a new era in the nation's capital, now seems an appropriate time to cast a nostalgic eye backwards at the magazine's Boston beginnings.

In 1857, when the magazine was founded by Francis H. Underwood and a group of writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, H. W. Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boston was a burgeoning literary center. The new magazine combined a humanist spirit with the energy of the growing publishing industry and the passion of the anti-slavery movement. In the early years, the writers and readers of The Atlantic were almost all New Englanders; later the editors began to look further afield for its audience and contributors. But for nearly 150 years, The Atlantic maintained an intimate relationship with its birth city and home. "[One] reason for our longevity," wrote the Atlantic's ninth editor, Edward Weeks¹—with characteristic native pride—"is that we have always been printed in Boston. Boston has been our vantage point, and I think the country respects us for the Yankee humor and integrity which flow in our veins."

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