In the spring of 1857, a group of like-minded men met at Boston’s Parker House Hotel brainstorming ideas for a new magazine. The co-founders of what would become The Atlantic Monthly included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and several others. The magazine—now known as The Atlantic—has been published continuously since its first issue in November 1857.

Ralph Waldo Emerson met Abraham Lincoln on two occasions. First in January 1853, when Emerson was lecturing in Springfield, Illinois and a then-unknown Lincoln was in the audience—and again in February 1862, when Emerson was invited to the White House to meet with President Lincoln. Initially unsure of his feelings about the President, Emerson was soon won over. He conveyed his admiration in a moving eulogy delivered after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.