Republic of Words

Goodman (English, Univ. of Delaware; Civil Wars: American Novelists and Manners) offers a vivid picture of mid-19th- and early 20th-century life as interpreted through the erudite pages of the Atlantic Monthly. Founded in Boston in 1857 by a group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the magazine continues to publish today. Goodman approaches her subject through the lens of the writers who contributed to it—a veritable who's who that includes Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, Jack London, Henry James, and Robert Frost. Striving to be a magazine of ideas rather than news, the periodical shed light on the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, the competing views of evolution between Louis Agassiz and Charles Darwin, the struggles for leadership in the African American community between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, and World War I and its aftermath.