James Russell Lowell becomes the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly magazine.

Lowell is succeeded by James Fields (1861), William Dean Howells (1870), Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1881), Horace Scudder (1890), Walter Hines Page (1898), Bliss Perry (1899), Ellery Sedgwick (1909*), Edward Weeks (1938), Robert Manning (1966), William Whitworth (1981), Michael Kelly (1999), and Cullen Murphy (2002). The magazine moves its operations to Washington, D.C. in 2006.