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Showing posts from November, 2016

Why Read The ‘New’ New Republic?

The New Republic began circulation in 1914, and continues to be published as of 2016. In the context of American periodicals that focus on politics and culture, however, this impressive longevity is not the benchmark: The Atlantic was first published in 1857, The Nation in 1865, and Harpers in 1850. TNR is marginally older than The New Yorker , which was founded in 1925, and a senior cousin to various post-WWII magazines such as Dissent (1954), Commentary (1945) and The New York Review of Books (1963).  So far there has not been a detailed, comparative historical account of the rarefied milieu of American political magazines. Such a study would be of great interest. The existing literature that comes close to filling this gap comes in the form of the memoirs of editors and contributors of these various periodicals. From these reflections we gain a mixture of historical fact and historical myth. Intellectual but non-academic, published either weekly, bi-weekly or monthly,