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  SUPPORTING SPONSOR  For the first time, subscribers can read every story published in The Atlantic from 1857 to today. Below is a note from our editor in chief about preserving the magazine’s rich past, and what awaits readers in the archive. For the first time, subscribers can read every story published in The Atlantic from 1857 to today.Below is a note from our editor in chief about preserving the magazine’s rich past, and what awaits readers in the archive.  Jeffrey GoldbergEDITOR IN CHIEF One of my great joys as a journalist at The Atlantic is to spelunk into our physical archive. And it has been a particular frustration of mine that I could not share the joy with our readers. So it is an enormous pleasure to let you know that we have finally made our full archive—representing 165 years of Atlantic journalism—available online. Nearly 30,000 articles, reviews, short stories, and poems, published between The Atlantic’s founding in 1857 and 1995, the year we launched our website (a site that included, from its start, articles that originated both in print and on the web), are now accessible to subscribers, researchers, students, historians, and that blessed category, the incurably curious. “The world is all gates, all opportunities,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of our founders, said, and the gates to our magazine’s rich past are now open. I hope that our readers will experience the same wonder I felt when I learned that The King and I, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, was birthed in the pages of The Atlantic, in the form of a memoir by Anna Leonowens. Or when I discovered Felix Frankfurter’s defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, or the rolling argument between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois on the methodology of Black liberation, or Mark Twain’s first impressions of the telephone, or one of Hemingway’s earliest short stories, or Rachel Carson’s initial foray into nature writing, or Sylvia Plath’s best poems, or Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (yes, first published in The Atlantic). You will find, as you explore the archives, luminous, limpid, and polyphonic prose, but I should warn you that you will find opaque and unintelligible prose as well, along with a good number of writers who merit their obscurity. It’s all here: the good, the bad, the brilliant, the offensive, the ridiculous. We knew from the start that we would engage in no censorship, trimming, or dodging. And so you will find in the archives eugenics sympathizers and people who today would correctly be called racist and misogynistic, imperialist, and anti-Semitic. As journalists, we felt it important to share our archives in full, for reasons of transparency and historical accuracy. To help our readers begin to explore the millions of words we’ve just uploaded to the web, we’re launching a special project spotlighting 25 writers from our past, with essays written by contemporary Atlantic writers. These featured writers include one of the two greatest figures of 19th-century American life, Frederick Douglass, along with Helen Keller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Raymond Chandler, and John Muir. And we’ll keep adding new writers, because the Atlantic bench has infinite depth. There is a universe of interest in our archives; I hope you find them illuminating. Please explore! Jeffrey Goldberg  |