Animating the Best of <i>The Atlantic</i>'s Archives

Art came to The Atlantic only belatedly. The magazine’s first issue, published in November 1857, comprised 128 pages of text without any visual accompaniment except for a small portrait of John Winthrop, a 17th-century governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, on the front. Aside from the occasional small sketch or header in this vein, no illustrations really graced the magazine’s pages or its covers until the 1940s. Photography began making inroads later that decade, and the first Atlantic videos debuted more than half a century after that.

All of this is to say that, during the magazine’s earlier years, some of its most illustrious writers saw their stories published without any art to complement them. While that’s no longer the case today, in recent months ’s animators have started bringing their artistic talentstechnologies, platforms, and insights, they’ve created visual interpretations with historical gravity and contemporary resonance—and not a small amount of flair.