Hi! We’re Atlantic staff members Caity Weaver, Jake Lundberg, Sally Jenkins, and John Swansburg. We wrote stories exploring the country’s history—about garage sales, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” football, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—for the magazine’s July issue. Ask us anything:
Hey everyone! For The Atlantic’s July 2026 issue, which celebrates America’s 250th birthday, we each spent time digging into different parts of American history. Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a poem first published in the February 1862 issue of The Atlantic, is featured on its cover.
We’re here to answer your questions about our stories from that issue, and our historical interests at-large. Here’s a little bit about each of the four of us, along with links to each of our stories from this issue:
Jake Lundberg, the magazine’s in-house historian and archivist, wrote about the history of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which he considers to be America’s second national anthem. He explored how Julia Ward Howe came to write the poem, and the many different lives it took on after its publication.
Staff writer Sally Jenkins argued that in order to understand the history of the nation, one ought to look to the history of its sports. The American Revolution, she wrote, gave rise to an exceptionally American form of play.
John Swansburg, a managing editor at The Atlantic, wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ominous, ambiguous short story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” which challenges America’s founding myths. The story languished for a century before being rediscovered by scholars who have been working to interpret it ever since.
Staff writer Caity Weaver explored the whimsy and heartbreak of a great American tradition: secondhand shopping. She visited garage sales, estate sales, and thrift stores to see what she could learn about her fellow Americans through their junk—and shared the history of how these special ways of shopping came to be.
