In 1857, in the midst of the greatest political strife a young nation had yet known, a group of prominent intellectuals and activists — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others — gathered together to create a New England literary magazine: The Atlantic. For more than a century, it was a leading voice for progressive causes, from abolition to civil rights, and a platform for some of the country's greatest literary voices. Today, it published a rage comic. "Props on the rage comic, Atlantic!" writes Newsweek.