On this day in 1857, the first issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine was published in Boston. Although none of the articles was signed, most readers easily recognized the work of such New England luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The writers, poets, and philosophers who launched the new journal believed that, as the intellectual elite of New England, they had a mission to create not just a magazine but a culture — a distinctly American literary culture. Their goal was to cast "the light of the highest morals" on an increasingly fragmented, mobile, and materialistic country. Almost a century and a half later, The Atlantic Monthly remains one of the nation's and the world's leading literary journals.