Since it was founded over a long lunch in Boston in 1857, The Atlantic has featured presidents and poets, abolitionists and suffragists— men and women set on advancing The American Idea. This episode, Kim takes the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on an ‘Atlantic alumni’ tour, stopping in front of a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. and a life-size painting of Mark Twain.

Their conversation previews an upcoming collaboration between The Atlantic and the National Portrait Gallery that will look at the portraits of yesterday’s disruptors through the lens of today.

See the portraits we discuss:

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Julia Ward Howe

Mark Twain

Martin Luther King Jr.