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Wow. This Is Quite A Way To Start


Razors Edge

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...a new magazine!

In the spring of 1857, a group of Boston transcendentalists gathered for dinner at the Parker House Hotel. After five hours of repartee, they decided to create a new magazine, one that would make politics, literature, and the arts its chief concerns.

They were united in three ways: their opposition to slavery, their love of American writing, and their tripartite names—including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Russell Lowell. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was invited, but she boycotted the dinner when she learned that alcohol would be served.

After everyone agreed on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s proposed name, a plan for The Atlantic was set. The founders wanted to be “fearless and outspoken” at the dawn of “a new era of human civilization.” In a manifesto, they promised to be “the organ of no party or clique”; to “honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea”; and to care for the “whole domain of aesthetics.” The manifesto was signed by, among others, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and yes, "Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe."

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