Where Will It End?
In its second issue, The Atlantic urged Northerners to take a stand against slavery.
December 1857 IssueArchive
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Melanie Lambrick Life Up Close
Travel the world to see microbes, plants, and animals in oceans, grasslands, forests, deserts, the icy poles—and wherever else they may be.
Carlos Javier Ortiz The Case for Reparations
Atlantic writers reckon with America's history of racial plunder.
The Atlantic KING
Fifty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a commemoration of his life and work—and a reflection on the reality of today's America.
Aubrey Trinnaman Planet
A guide to life on a warming planet, featuring the biggest ideas and most vital information to understand Earth’s changing climate, climate policy, and more.
The Atlantic Votes for Women
The signing of the 19th Amendment in 1920 gave women the right to vote, but the complex fight for suffrage didn’t end there.
Olivia Locher On Teaching
From 2018 through the first year of the pandemic, the most experienced teachers in America’s education system reflected on their careers, their schools, and the history they’ve witnessed.
Illustration by The Atlantic Artificial Intelligence
Making sense of the dawn of a new machine age.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty 2024 Elections
Coverage from the latest election cycle, including campaigns, primaries, and conventions.
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The Atlantic Writers Project
Contemporary Atlantic writers reflect on 25 voices from the archives who helped shape the publication—and the nation.
Editor’s Picks
J. A. Palmer / Library of Congress 
Bettmann / Getty Speaking of Music
“Can anyone explain in mere prose the wonder of one note following or coinciding with another so that we feel that it is exactly how those notes had to be? Of course not.”
December 1957 Issue
Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress 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.
May 1936 Issue
Associated Press 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.”
May 1938 Issue
AP 
Peter Meyer / AP Living With Fallout
An American abroad in Chernobyl’s aftermath confronts the half-life of truth
January 1987 Issue
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Notable Writers
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates, the author of Between the World and Me, wrote “The Case for Reparations” as a national correspondent for The Atlantic.
Virginia Woolf
Woolf was a novelist and a pioneer of literary modernism.
Rachel L. Carson
Before writing Silent Spring, Carson made her mark as an environmental journalist with the Atlantic essay “Undersea.”
E. B. White
White was an essayist, a novelist, and a grammarian. His Atlantic essay “Death of a Pig” was a nonfiction prototype for Charlotte’s Web.
Rebecca West
West’s reporting on her travels through the Balkans, published in The Atlantic in 1941, was compiled in the book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Charles Dickens
One of the most popular writers of his time, Dickens was the author of works including A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities.
Anna Deavere Smith
Smith is an Atlantic contributing writer, a playwright, and an actor.
W. H. Auden
Auden published his first poem for The Atlantic in 1939, the year he emigrated from England to the United States.
Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut was the author of 14 novels, as well as numerous short-story collections, plays, and works of nonfiction.
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