Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment.
“A magazine, when properly conducted, is the nursery of genius; and by constantly accumulating new matter, becomes a kind of market for wit and utility.”
Thomas Paine made this (true) statement in 1775, in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Magazine, for which he served as editor. In this same manifesto, he had unkind words for the magazine’s older cousins. “The British magazines, at their commencement, were the repositories of ingenuity: They are now the retailers of tale and nonsense. From elegance they sunk to simplicity, from simplicity to folly, and from folly to voluptuousness.”
Paine, though enamored of the new American style of magazine making, resigned his post after less than a year because the owner refused to give him a raise. His premature departure allowed him time to write Common Sense, so a skinflint publisher inadvertently aided the cause of freedom.
The John Carter Brown Library, a treasury of American history on the campus of Brown University, holds the complete run of The Pennsylvania Magazine, and on a recent visit I became preoccupied with the July 1776 issue, the last one ever published. It is richly idiosyncratic. One article discusses the most effective way to prevent scurvy at sea (“one ounce and an half of the juice of oranges or lemons,” mixed with grog), and a lengthy exhortation warns women that their hairpins could kill them. “How little do our ladies imagine, when they surround their heads with wire, the most powerful of all conductors, and at the same time wear stockings, shoes, and gowns of silk, one of the most powerful repellants, that they prepare their bodies in the same manner, and according to the same principles, as electricians prepare their conductors for attracting the fire of lightning?”
Hidden near the back of the magazine we find a set of documents, collected under the rubric “Monthly Intelligence.” These documents include the newly written constitutions of Virginia, Connecticut, and New Jersey, as well as … the Declaration of Independence.
I personally might have given the Declaration more of a boost. This was the July 1776 issue, after all, and I must imagine that the decision by the united colonies to declare independence from King George III counted among the more important news events of the month. I asked Karin Wulf, the historian who leads the library, why the editors might have buried the Declaration. She speculated that they took seriously the format of their monthly book. “It’s true that we think of the Declaration of Independence as a broadside publication, not something to run up against the New Jersey state constitution,” she said. But editors, even then, were “committed to the structure and order of the magazine, and that’s where a document like this belonged.”
Entirely plausible. And yet, I would argue—noncontroversially, I hope—that the Declaration, and what it stood for, deserved better placement. And a big, clanging headline.
The Atlantic in your hands does not make the mistake of downplaying the Declaration, or the events of 1776. You will see that we are not simplistic, jingoistic, or uncritical in our approach, but we are indeed motivated by the idea that the American Revolution represents one of the most important events in the history of the planet, and its ideals continue to symbolize hope and freedom for humankind.
You have no doubt noticed that this issue commemorating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States comes not long after the 249th anniversary. We are publishing this at the end of 2025 for a number of reasons: This month marks the launch of an Atlantic project meant to explain the meaning of the Revolution and its consequences, which we will carry through all of next year. We wanted to place ourselves, in the coming discussion, ahead of the curve (and ahead of our more voluptuous competitors). We also recognize that the American experiment is under extraordinary pressure at the moment, and we think it important to do anything we can to illuminate the challenges we face.
And one more, specific reason as well: Last year, in conversation with the great documentarian Ken Burns about his forthcoming series, The American Revolution, I realized that a companion issue of the magazine would be appreciated by our readers, and be useful to the general public—especially to people who are worried about the staying power of the American idea. The documentary, which will be broadcast on PBS in six parts beginning on November 16, is accompanied by a fascinating article written for this issue by Burns and his co-directors, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. In it, they describe the difficulties of putting on film a war fought before the advent of photography, and they suggest that the Revolution is so enveloped in myth that it would take a lifetime to make clear its stakes. (The three directors, expert documentary makers all, actually needed only 12 hours to capture the shocking complexity of the period.)
In pursuit of illumination, we have assembled in this current issue an extraordinary range of writers. Here are just a few: Rick Atkinson tells us the complicated truth of King George (there is more to him than mere madness); Annette Gordon-Reed looks at America’s unmet promise; Stacy Schiff examines the civil war within the Franklin family; Caity Weaver learns to fire a musket; John Swansburg, who led the team that edited this issue (our largest in years), revives Rip Van Winkle; George Packer makes the case for an enlightened patriotism rooted in the ideals of 1776; Fintan O’Toole asks what the Founders would make of America today; and Jake Lundberg, The Atlantic’s in-house historian and archivist, writes about Lincoln and the way in which he called upon the spirit of 1776 to remind his fellow Americans of the work still before them. “As the nation fractured, Lincoln summoned the Revolution as neither empty hypocrisy nor mindless triumph,” Lundberg writes, “but as an unfinished project whose noblest values could redeem the past and heal the present.”
The project is still unfinished, and troubled, but it remains a project worth pursuing. That is the argument of this issue.
Thank you to the British Library, which opened its doors to us, including the doors to King George III’s (suitably majestic) 65,000-volume private collection, and supported research. Thank you as well to the John Carter Brown Library, which shared artifacts from its remarkable collection of Americana.
This editor’s note appears in the November 2025 print edition.
