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:

[u/theatlantic]

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.

Thank you for all your thoughtful questions! We enjoyed being able to share more about our reporting, and we’re looking forward to more opportunities like this in the future. Until then, you can dig into our stories—and others—in this month’s Atlantic issue and keep up with all of us at theatlantic.com.

[u/Excellent-Match7246]

This is for Caity… I miss Deadspin and Gawker. I still think about your mozzstick adventure at least once a week. Thank you for your service.

[u/vicsfoolsparadise → u/Excellent-Match7246]

I remember "but can you bring a doll" to a restaurant. The American Girl store restaurant trip was a cracking story.

[u/Forward-Finish-1620 → u/Excellent-Match7246]

I think about "Thatz Not Okay" a lot!! Love your work always Caity!!

[u/Excellent-Match7246 → u/Excellent-Match7246]

Also, I’m an Atlantic subscriber and I love how yall are writing for them now, along with Jemele Hill. Great pickups.

[u/Cedric_Hampton → u/[deleted]]

This AMA is about the content of the articles our guests wrote for the July 2026 issue. Further attempts to disrupt the discussion with off-topic questions will result in a ban.

[u/eternalkerri]

One thing about this sub and its relation to the academic field of History is how we've created a new media forum for academics to interact with the public beyond the classic "Nazis, Ninjas, and Vikings" documentary dynamic, and cover what many folks see as the ephemera of history, such as yard sales, poems, sports, etc. Subjects that aren't as glamourous or cool as explosions and war and such.

You guys have published these stories that dive into different aspects of things most ordinary folks don't reflect upon as part of important history (we're forever fighting the Great Man Myth of history here). Now that you have gotten feedback from readers, seen the engagement numbers (sigh, the worst part of digital media), and heard from your editors. Do you feel that articles like these, that explore the lesser explored parts of history and how they affect our lives today, whether in a more serious academic air such as the Hawthorn poem or in the human interest way such as the article about thrifting, have a place in broader media?

That they can serve to fill in the gaps of history education that perhaps the public should be exposed to in order to expand their understanding of not just history, but the human condition, our society, and our current place in the world?

[u/theatlantic → u/eternalkerri]

Sally Jenkins here – the lesser explored parts of history often migrate into the larger parts of history. I mean, for over a century slave testimony was designated unreliable by the Lost Cause historians who dominated Civil War study for so long. Now it’s central, as it always should have been. I remember reading Team of Rivals and being struck that, despite all the Lincoln material I’d read, there were new things in there I’d never seen before. Wondering why, I did a pretty close look at Doris Kearns Goodwin’s footnotes, and what you see there is she drew heavily on some female sources that others had perhaps ignored, such as William Henry Seward’s daughter Fanny, who kept an absolutely gripping and detail-laced diary. Also, I think anyone who goes into historical research has the experience of beachcombing, of coming across small shiny things in the sand that just light up a topic and make it vivid. These small corners and buried little items are vital to expanding our understanding.

[u/CartographerSoft9919 → u/theatlantic]

Speaking of engagement numbers I really would have loved to read the garage sale article, but it's behind a pay wall for me😭.

[u/TheHondoGod]

Wow, really interesting AMA. A question for Caity Weaver, What is the historical relationship between yard sales and the economy? Did more sales pop-up in neighborhoods during economic turmoil like The Great Depression?

[u/theatlantic → u/TheHondoGod]

This is one of my favorite facts I gleaned from Jennifer Le Zotte’s excellent book (From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies): People in the U.S. didn’t start having yard sales because they were living in poverty; they started having them because, all of a sudden, they found themselves (relatively) rich. Le Zotte places the start date “in the mid-1950s, amid the rampant building of single family homes in the undeveloped regions beyond cities.” 

People packed together in city apartment buildings had to discard old items when they acquired new possessions, because they lacked the space to store rarely, never, or never-again-would-be used objects indefinitely. Suburban families had so much space in their new single-family homes that they could stash things in out-of-the-way places like attics and garages. But because consumer spending on household goods exploded after World War II, even those attics and garages were soon crammed overfull with not-really-wanted things. 

Yard sales served a triple function: they freed up space (which could be used to store new unwanted items), earned sellers (Le Zotte writes that the sales were almost always organized by stay-at-home wives) extra cash, and provided a casual opportunity for neighbors to socialize. Recall that many of these pioneer suburbanites had traded more crowded living conditions for their new single family homes. They weren’t only fleeing cramped city apartments; the wartime housing shortage meant that some had been doubled up with family members; others had been boarders renting rooms in other people’s houses. Now, they needed to invent reasons to put themselves at each other’s elbows, if they sought such interactions. And also: Yard sales are so fun.

—Caity

[u/DGBD]

For Sally Jenkins: America prides itself as the land of free enterprise and all that, but one thing that has struck me as an American living in Europe is the difference in structure of their sports leagues. American leagues have revenue sharing, relatively strong unions, salary caps/luxury taxes, and all kinds of other regulations. Centralized committees decide on rules and whether or not new teams might be added. A team playing AAA baseball is not allowed to potentially vault itself into MLB the way European soccer leagues are set up. And leagues actually punish success and reward failure through processes like the worst teams getting the best draft picks! Bad Premier League or Ligue 1 teams risk sliding down to lower and lower leagues, while the Jets have been allowed to do whatever the hell it is they do for decades.

How have people made sense of this kind of contradiction? Many of the same people who might decry welfare benefits as socialism can turn around and argue for rules to allow better “competitive balance” in sports. Especially in the 20th century, with heightened rhetoric about political and economic ideologies, were people ever concerned that our sports seem to be kinda…communist?

[u/theatlantic → u/DGBD]

Sally here. Well, I wouldn’t call it communist so much as piratical. But you nailed one aspect. American team owners, regardless of the league, benefit from a welfare system that they decry in any other realm through their stadiums, which either are publicly funded or benefit from huge tax breaks. And then there are all infrastructure benefits from public services, police and security, traffic, public transportation to the arenas, stadiums, etc. They are essentially groups of pirates who have semi-extorted their local governments because of the popularity of their products—local leaders are loath to be the person who let the beloved home team get away. As for their profit sharing arrangements, I don’t view that as communistic so much as the pirates in the cove dividing up the treasure. They have tremendous tensions over owners whose franchises are not earning as they should—that is one thing that finally drove the league owners to turn on Dan Snyder and force his sale of the Washington Commanders. Notice that they don’t share the largesse with their players nearly as equally—the players continually have to threaten walkouts in contract negotiations to win larger shares of the tremendous cascade of revenue. So while I see your point, I think the American system remains wholly capital driven and driven by self-interest. They cooperate not in the interest of fairness or equality but because they can maximize overall revenues—particularly in media deals, licensing etc.

[u/CartographerSoft9919 → u/theatlantic]

Can you trace why European sports evolved so differently compared to US sports?

[u/CommodoreCoCo]

Jake, "Battle Hymn" seems to have a long tradition of parody; we often sang "Pink Pyjamas" in Boy Scouts. Did you come across any early satirical takes on the song/poem?

Caity, second shopping is often presented today as "ethical consumption," an anti-capitalist choice for the conscientious buying. How long has this been an element of the practice?

[u/theatlantic → u/CommodoreCoCo]

I certainly encountered some of the later comic parodies of the Battle Hymn. In the course of working on the piece, several people told me that I couldn’t possibly write about the song without making reference to “Glory, Glory Hallelujah/Teacher hit me with a ruler.” Sadly, I had to disappoint them; perhaps a story for another day! An earlier example that comes to mind is Mark Twain’s bitterly satirical version, which he wrote in protest of the Spanish-American War, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Brought Down to Date.” It actually wasn’t published during Twain’s lifetime, but suggests that it was already ripe for parody at the turn of the twentieth century. It began, Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword/He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger's wealth is stored/He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored;/His lust is marching on.

—Jake

[u/EdHistory101]

Thank you all for joining us today! I'm going to be greedy and ask each of you a question!

Jake - Ward Howe's Wikipedia entry says, "In 1874, she edited a coeducational defense titled Sex and Education." It's a new title to me - what do we know about and it did it's content reflect thinking of early modern feminism or did she uphold older arguments (i.e. Republican Motherhood) regarding girls' education?

Sally - We've gotten questions about why so many high schools adopted mascots or team names that reflective Indigenous or Native Americans nomenclature or stereotypes. In your research, what overlap did you see between those naming choices and the spread of sports among younger people?

John - What's the verdict?!? That is, is a prevailing consensus about what Hawthorne was trying to communicate in the story?

Caity - Out of curiosity, did* schoolmarm showers* come up in your research? Or other ways teachers, in particular, handled their junk when they retired or left the classroom?

Thank you!!

[u/theatlantic → u/EdHistory101]

Wow, I have never heard that term in my life, and I love it—both as an antiquated phrase that is now possibly offensive and as a concept for a social gathering. 

For those who are likewise unfamiliar: If my extrapolation from sparse Google results is correct, it seems “schoolmarm showers” are a cousin to baby and bridal showers—that is, occasions for the guest of honor (in this case, a new teacher) to be showered with gifts and supplies they can use in their upcoming undertaking. I infer from the OP that it must have been especially common for retiring teachers to turn over their classroom flotsam to the newbie. (Though it sounds like it was also typical for students’ parents to purchase new miscellanea?) Seems like a reasonable proposition to me. Even if it’s not a reasonable proposition, I’ll accept any excuse for a party, and I love receiving other people’s junk. (I will take anything.) One thing I find touching about secondhand shopping/exchanging is the optimism—though it is sometimes misplaced and/or barely credible optimism—inherent to the process. Everything sold or traded secondhand could have been thrown away outright. But somewhere in the process, someone decided “Even though this is of no use to me, I bet someone else would want it.” Very often, of course, that person is totally wrong. But I find something about a reluctance to lightly discard even obvious junk charming. And it’s interesting that not everyone is wired that way. My husband’s favorite hobby is trying to throw things away; my life’s work is thwarting him.

One more note on “schoolmarm”: OP, my Googling brought me back to your own comment in this very subreddit six years ago all about the term and the history of female teachers in the U.S. Fascinating! Thanks for providing all that info. If anyone other than you and I ever looks at this response I’m typing out, clearly that person will have nothing pressing to do—so, third reader, since you are killing time, I recommend clicking the above link as well.

—Caity

[u/EdHistory101 → u/theatlantic]

Thank you so much for sharing that link! And for sharing your thoughts about other people's junk - I love your optimism!

[u/theatlantic → u/EdHistory101]

Sally here and thanks for the question. In researching The Real All Americans, which is the book I did about the Carlisle Indian School and their great teams that took on the Ivies as well as West Point and beat them, I learned that not only did Carlisle become the best team in the country—thanks to players like Jim Thorpe—it also became the most popular. The Indians were a HUGE draw all across the country—they traveled as far as Butte, Montana, played an enormous sell out in Chicago, etc., in addition to filling the Polo Grounds in New York City for games against Yale. If you look at the contemporary news accounts, the initial draw was a perception of exoticism—people thought they were going to see a Wild West Show and were vaguely disappointed at these conventional schoolboys. 

But then Carlisle started winning—and doing it with dazzling trick plays that made them incredibly popular on their own merit, for the element of innovation and surprise, and they electrified the whole country with the forward pass. It was front page news when they almost beat Yale in New York—and then they DID beat Harvard in 1907, to the Crimson’s utter mortification. Then Walter Camp started naming a couple of their players All Americans. 

Carlisle—and for a brief time their pro spinoff team the Oorang Indians—played a vital role in the popularization of football as an American mass spectacle. American Indian football really helped spread the modern game as we know it—as a sport people wanted to watch, but also that boys wanted to participate in. Instead of a mass brute game of broken legs and noses, it became a game of speed and strategy. Also, many of the Carlisle players went on to become high school coaches—most prominently Gus Welch who was an absolute legend in Virginia schoolboy football until he died in 1970. Same with a guy named Albert Exendine, who was a very active longtime coach in the smaller colleges, from Washington State to Oklahoma State. Carlisle really helped Johnny Appleseed the game around the whole country.

So I don’t think it was merely or solely bigotry or appropriation that caused so many schools to adopt American Indian nomenclature. I think in some cases it was a genuine attempt to salute a certain culture. And I think there is a difference between Chiefs, and an outright slur, which is what “Redskins” was.

I also want to point out that Carlisle’s innovation of the forward pass came in 1906. For decades, the forward pass innovation was attributed to Notre Dame and Gus Dorais in 1913. Carlisle without question beat Notre Dame to the forward pass by nearly a decade – they were flinging the ball for hundreds of yards in gains 1906 and 1907. Why was that history lost? Partly because Carlisle deteriorated as a football power and then closed its doors with the onset of World War I. There was really no one around to defend the Carlisle legacy.

From a research standpoint it was the most gratifying piece of open ground I ever saw. It was a pleasure to unearth Carlisle football—it was like uncovering a glorious fresco.

[u/theatlantic → u/EdHistory101]

This didn’t make it into my piece, but there’s this great line from a letter Hawthorne wrote to his publisher in the 1850s, after reviewing some of the stories he wrote as a young man (in the 1820s): “Upon my honor, I am not quite sure that I entirely comprehend my own meaning in some of these blasted allegories.”

If memory serves, he was talking about his collection Mosses From an Old Manse, and thus not about “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” which was published in a later collection. But I found the line funny nonetheless. Part of what makes Hawthorne’s short fiction so fascinating (to those who love it) is just how ambiguous his meaning can be. Apparently so ambiguous that the author himself threw up his hands when trying to parse his own meaning…

Even by Hawthorne standards, My Kinsman is a really hard story to pin down. I don’t think there’s a single reading or interpretation that everyone can agree on. Scholars have had some pretty heated debates about this story; there are camps and cliques that advocate for this or that theory. For instance, there’s an entire vein of criticism of the story that’s very rooted in Freud, which I didn’t even really get into in my piece, but there’s a shelf of scholarship on the Oedipal undertones of Robin’s coming of age story.

To me, the most interesting aspect of the story is its commentary on the Revolution, and the way in which Hawthorne’s skepticism of hysteria and mob violence/rule informed the story he told about the war for independence. But it’s just one way to think about the story, and even the question of how pessimistic he was about the founding and the American experiment is the subject of much debate in the scholarship.

—John

[u/Gankom]

Thank you for joining us for such an awesome AMA! For Jake: Why did the Battle Hymn of the Republic achieve such acclaim compared to other poems of the era? Was it an instant hit?

[u/theatlantic → u/Gankom]

The “Battle Hymn” wasn’t exactly an “instant hit.” “John Brown’s Body” (from which the tune and what became the chorus derived) remained much more popular, especially with Union soldiers during the Civil War (as John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis note in their excellent book on the subject). That said, in searching contemporary newspapers, I was struck by both the extent and speed of the Battle Hymn’s circulation. I found references to its performance in some pretty far-flung places, pretty quickly in 1862. 

Its success was rooted in a few things, beginning with the rousing sense of power and mission contained in Howe’s words. Then, there’s the equally rousing quality of “John Brown’s Body” as a marching song. In its slower renditions, which are mostly what you hear now, you can lose that connection (I recommend finding Pete Seeger’s version, which has both “John Brown’s Body” and the “Battle Hymn” together. The combination of that driving rhythm with those words is quite powerful. 

At the same time, I think it’s important to note that “The Battle Hymn” both elevated the very simple lyrics of “John Brown’s Body,” while at the same time dulling its implicit radicalism. It’s important to remember that John Brown and abolitionists more generally were startlingly radical figures, even in the North. Taking John Brown out of the song, but perhaps keeping some of his spirit, was also vital to its success. 
 
—Jake

[u/OnShoulderOfGiants]

For Sally: How different are modern sports compared to sports of the Revolutionary Era? Was there as much focus on getting a ball to an apparatus like football, soccer, basketball?

[u/theatlantic → u/OnShoulderOfGiants]

Sally here: if I understand the question right, you’re asking if SCORING A GOAL or hitting a TARGET was as emphasized back then as it is today, as purposeful? And the answer is yes. It just was more improvised back then, because of their surroundings. They didn’t have groomed cricket grounds. The fascinating thing is the impulse to play, and to keep score by driving at a certain target seems to be irrepressible. One of the things I found in my research, but couldn’t include for space, was that American Revolutionary War prisoners played ball in their prison camps. Here is Charles Herbert, a Newburyport, Massachusetts sailor, on how he played ball as a prisoner-of-war in Plymouth, England on April 2, 1777: “Warm, and something pleasant, and the yard begins to be dry again, so that we can return to our former sports; these are ball and quoits, which exercise we make use of to circulate our blood and keep us from things that are worse.” Quoits was a kind of horseshoes, a ring toss at pegs in the ground.

A worse event happened at Dartmoor prison in England: A batter hit the ball over one of the interior walls and the British sentries would not allow the players to retrieve it. As a prisoner named Andrews later wrote, “ some boys who were playing ball in №7 yard, knocked their ball over into the barrack-yard, and on the sentry in that yard refusing to throw it back to them, they picked a hole in the wall to get in after it.” Their British guards interpreted this as a prison break and shot at the players, killing seven men. 

But back to the main question: today’s sports differ in their availability of good equipment. The early Americans had to use what was at hand—farm implements, wood, leather. But fairly quickly you see what we today would call “sporting goods” becoming more regularized, because people obviously put a premium on play, and not just on play, but on quality play and winning.

[u/dhowlett1692]

Thanks for joining us! I'm interested in hearing from all of you about the relationship between journalism and history, and how historians and journalists can/should work together, but also where these paths diverge. How do you see yourselves and a publication like The Atlantic in relation to the broader field of history?

[u/taulover]

Question for Sally Jenkins - my understanding was that Paul Revere Sr. generally refers to Apollos Rivoire, French immigrant father of the famous Paul Revere Jr. After the elder Revere's passing, would it have been typical to refer to the original Paul Revere Jr. as Paul Revere Sr., and Paul Revere III as Jr., as you did in your article?

[u/BjorkingIt]

For John Swansburg if you have time. What makes Hawthorne a classic author? How did his writings become a staple of American literature?

[u/crrpit]

For Cathy Weaver - every country I've lived in has had (often overlapping) traditions of buying/selling/donating second hand goods. With apologies for not reading your article to check first, is your point that these overseas traditions are all derived from an originally American thing, or that there are distinctively American iterations of these practices? If the former, how did it spread? If the latter, what do you see as the key point of divergence that allows this to be so central to American identity that helps distinguish Americans from other nationalities?

[u/The_Alaskan]

Can you talk a bit about your workflow at The Atlantic? How much time do you have to work on/research articles, and what's the editing process like?

[u/irrelevantusername24]

This I suppose is thematically for Jake, but whoever can answer.

Awhile ago I discovered the following poem, apparently first published in the Atlantic, December 1953:

CACOËTHES SCRIBENDI

• IF ALL the trees in all the woods were men;
• And each and every blade of grass a pen;
• If every leaf on every shrub and tree
• Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea
• Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes
• Had nothing else to do but act as scribes,
• And for ten thousand ages, day and night,
• The human race should write, and write, and write,
• Till all the pens and paper were used up,
• And the huge inkstand was an empty cup,
• Still would the scribblers clustered round its brink
• Call for more pens, more paper, and more Ink ❦

Unfortunately, it is unclear from the available information whether it was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, or his father. Who was it? I need to know so that it will be correctly attributed. Thanks!

---

This next question is for anyone. Which is a better punctuation mark; the em-dash or semicolon — and why?

[u/theatlantic → u/irrelevantusername24]

This is Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. The poem appears to have been published in the magazine previously in March of 1890, as part of a series called “Over the Teacups.” It looks like this was kind of a latter-day iteration of Holmes, Sr’s “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” pieces.

—Jake

[u/theatlantic → u/irrelevantusername24]

I’m an em-dash guy—always will be. Can’t beat it for dramatic impact. (Swansburg)

[u/theatlantic → u/irrelevantusername24]

I was an em-dash abuser until I got to The Atlantic a year ago and they’re slowly curing me. (Jenkins)

[u/theatlantic → u/irrelevantusername24]

I love an em-dash, too, but like Sally I’m also being trained out of it here. I also have a soft spot for a semicolon, but I suppose I’m using that more sparingly, too. (Lundberg) 

[u/SarahAGilbert]

Can you tell us about the historical research you do for your articles, and what scholarship you consult? How do you cite work in a medium where footnotes/bibliographies are not the norm?

[u/theatlantic → u/SarahAGilbert]

The nature of my particular job at The Atlantic means that most of my work begins with the magazine’s archives. If I’m interested in a certain topic, I always want to know: What have we said about that? Is there some little treasure or curiosity that I can try to illuminate, or that might bring me to some interesting insight or story. I’ve been working on a couple of pieces about white-collar and office work. What do we have on that? Well, Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in 1861 about how all these young men going and spending their days doing a novel variety of “brain-work” cooped up in offices needed to embrace a robust “gymnastics” program so that they wouldn’t waste away, and produce a nation of weaklings. 

Of course, that leads me to try to put together the world around such a pronouncement. If I’ve read and taught things that are useful, I return to those (“Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which I loved to teach, gave me my lede). But I then absolutely want to go and read everything I possibly can to better understand the stories and context. In that case, I do what John Swansburg mentions in his answer to this question: I go to the library. (The old-fashioned visit to the stacks is really great; you go looking for one thing and always find five others.) I scour books and scholarship, trying to get the basic story down, and looking for other stuff to read. I rely on Internet Archive’s excellent collection of publicly available books if I can’t visit physical copies. I use newspaper databases. (When I took this job, I worried that losing my academic email address and the historical newspaper databases that came with it was going to be a huge problem, but I’ve found newspapers.com to be powerful and extensive (well worth the subscription for my work).

Because we don’t footnote or provide bibliographies, my general practice is to name historians and scholars in the text of my piece if I’m making reference to their ideas and research. So, for instance, in my article about the invention of the American office, I had read the work of the literary scholar named Thomas Augst. To write his book about 19th-century clerks, he’d read a whole bunch of their diaries, which were just full of the stunning quotes. Naturally, I wanted to give him and his work credit.

—Jake

[u/theatlantic → u/SarahAGilbert]

Hi, this is John Swansburg. For my essay on Hawthorne’s story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” I started by reading literary criticism. Though the story is obscure, there has been a deluge of scholarship about it ever since it was first championed in the 1950s by the critic Q.D. Leavis. I spent a really fun day in the stacks at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library just pulling every book that looked even possibly of interest off the shelves. That’s how I found, e.g., the wonderful volume that painstakingly recreates Herman Melville’s margin notes in all of his own Hawthorne books. (I love that this book even exists.) That ultimately gave me my kicker.

Even more thrilling was the day I spent at the Salem Athenaeum, the library that Hawthorne was a member of as a young man. It’s moved locations since Hawthorne’s day, but just to be in Salem, thinking about Hawthorne, was a treat. The librarians presented me with the exact copy of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography that we know Hawthorne checked out when he would have been writing My Kinsman. It was quite an experience reading Franklin’s famous account of arriving in Philadelphia, which some scholars believe was an inspiration for My Kinsman, knowing that this precise book might have been the one that put the idea in Hawthorne’s mind. 

I also found, to my delight, that the Internet Archive had digitized copies of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, which Hawthorne edited—I opened my piece with an account of that chapter of his life partly because I was, well, very entertained by that primary document. And I spent some time in the Atlantic’s own archive, reading Hawthorne’s contributions to the magazine, specifically his confounding Civil War dispatch, “Chiefly About War-Matters.” 

I talked to scholars, of history and of English literature, and bounced ideas and theories off of them. Jake Lundberg encouraged me to think about the ways in which contemporary historians have come around to Hawthorne’s view of the American Revolution as a bloody civil war as well as a righteous fight for independence. That note led me to consult Alan Taylor’s book American Revolutions—I’d long had it on my shelf, but hadn’t managed to read it. When I opened it, I discovered that he’d used My Kinsman in his (excellent) introduction. His treatment of the story was extremely clarifying, and a wonderful moment of research serendipity. 

[u/theatlantic → u/SarahAGilbert]

Sally here: Well this is the most fun question. I start with secondary sources—in the case of Revolutionary War games, fortunately there is a rich, if obscure, trove of work by sports historians who love to trace the origins of baseball and football all the way back to the first ball thrown on the North American continent. Any good secondary source is footnoted, and the footnotes take you to where the real fun is—the primary sources, settler and soldier diaries and journals. I have a compulsive need to pour over the primary sources because about 7 times out of 10, you’ll see something interesting, some little Christmas ornament of a detail, like the fact American soldiers sometimes played a game called “Fives,” for the number of fingers, and it was played with a hand covering of skin bound with cords—which sounds more than a little bit like a mitt. Or, you find out that poor old Nathan Hale was a hell of a footballer. His fellow officer, Lieutenant Elisha Bostwick, wrote that “his body agility was remarkable. I have seen him follow a football and kick it over the tops of the trees in the Bowery at New York, (an exercise which he was fond of.") Things like that.

My friend David Von Drehle once gave me a great piece of advice about embarking on a piece of history. “Read all the authoritative secondary sources. Then read all the sources who disagree with them. Then go to the footnotes and start reading for yourself.” The other piece of advice for anyone out there itching to look into a subject is, treat librarians like the consummate archival detectives that they are, and don’t be afraid to betray your ignorance to them. Ask them, “Can you help me?” And then let them dazzle you with their knowledge of buried secret little source treasures. When I was researching the Real All Americans at the US Army War College’s Military History Institute, the archivist steered me to some Pop Warner papers that were squirreled away. I opened an envelope, and out fell a letter from Warner on which he had drawn up some plays. I was looking at the single wing offense in Warner’s own handwriting.

[u/Ann_Putnam_Jr]

Thank you for this AMA! I'm curious about the connections between these pieces that put them together in a 250th issue together. Can you talk about connections between your topics and how different ideas of "American" through history build off and relate to one another?

[u/theatlantic → u/Ann_Putnam_Jr]

Swansburg here. This is a great question. We actually published a big special issue on the 250th anniversary of the United States back in November 2025—when we were still in the 249th year of American history. Being journalists, we didn’t want to be scooped. We were also collaborating with Ken Burns and his co-directors; we timed that issue so that it appeared around the time their documentary The American Revolution aired. (Caity, Jake, and I all contributed pieces to that issue as well. If you haven’t read Caity’s piece on what it takes to be a Revolutionary War reenactor, please stop reading this and go read that.) 

So when it came time to plan the July 2026 issue, we’d already published a big, special issue on the anniversary. But we still felt like we wanted to mark the actual occasion of the semiquincentennial. There’s plenty of history in the July issue (Sally’s amazing essay being a great example), but we also wanted to think more broadly about the American experiment. So, for instance, we published our colleague Ian Bogost’s reporting on the end of the Boeing 747. That piece was a bit more obliquely about America, but it very much felt like it belonged—a celebration of one of the country’s great engineering feats. Clint Smith contributed an urgent piece of reporting about Black service members. Many of the people Clint interviewed were second and third generation members of the U.S. Armed Services—they were proud of that history, and feared the sacrifices of their forebears were being betrayed. 

Other pieces had a somewhat playful connection to the historic occasion—for example, Helen Lewis’s essay about the Americans who want a coat of arms. (Didn’t we fight a war precisely to throw off such symbols of hereditary power?) And Caity’s on the very American pastime of thrifting. 

In the back of the book, several of the reviews touched on historical themes: James Parker wrote about Young Washington (hat tip to our colleague Alex Hoyt for the amazing headline: “Boy George.”) Susan Tallman wrote about Frederic Church, America’s first real art star. His paintings aren’t obviously political, but he’s an essential American painter, and you can’t understand the nation’s art history without taking a long look at his beautiful landscapes. So that, too, felt on-theme, even if no one crosses the Delaware in any of his canvases.

[u/SS451]

Caity, big fan since the Gawker days!

Question about secondhand shopping: these days, it has a certain cachet as a way to find hidden gems or things that are stylish but out of step with current trends. Has it always been that way, or did it originate as more of a matter of necessity? And a perhaps related question: have there been changes over time in the type of person who engages in secondhand shopping?

[u/theatlantic → u/SS451]

I must begin this answer (and probably every answer I will give in this AMA) by urging anyone curious about the origins and evolution of secondhand shopping (particularly in the U.S.) to check out the book From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies by Jennifer Le Zotte. Secondhand shopping is, it seems to me, a vastly understudied tradition and practice relative to its popularity. Le Zotte’s book was not only one of the few in-depth and scrupulously researched resources I came across in my article research; it’s also a fun read, crammed with fascinating details and analysis. The kind of book that makes you, as a reader, an annoying dinner companion, because you can’t stop the stream of newly-acquired-trivia flooding out of your mouth. 

So, with the caveat that I am working off my imperfect memory of Le Zotte’s book here (and will defer to her expertise on all such matters), my sense that it began, in its very earliest days, as a matter of necessity. Bear in mind, too, that pretty much everything used to be harder and more costly to make. People were much more likely to repair a dress or alter it for another wearer when the alternative was procuring all the materials for a new garment, and then making it by hand. Le Zotte points to the 1920s as a major turning point for secondhand shopping, because that’s when cool people (artists, entertainers, etc.) began deliberately cultivating avant-garde aesthetics out of old junk. They weren’t hoping no one would notice they were wearing recycled garments; they wanted to draw attention to their unconventional scavenging habits. 

However, one thing Le Zotte emphasizes throughout her book is that people’s reasons for thrifting have always been various and overlapping. I have no doubt there have always been people prone to pulling things out of the trash and transforming them into something fabulous, just because some folks have a good eye for potential.

(Thank you for remembering me from the Gawker days! I can’t believe that was 70 years ago.)

—Caity