The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics

November 1865: the Civil War has been dead for seven months, Lincoln is dead, and America is stumbling into Reconstruction. This issue of The Atlantic Monthly captures the American literary mind at exactly that inflection moment. Beyond the expected essays on philosophy and politics, this volume contains something unexpected: a German gothic tale of haunting at Putkammer Castle, where a young nobleman and his father are driven from their ancestral home by mysterious sounds of phantom revelry in a long-sealed hall. The story threads the supernatural through Enlightenment skepticism, asking what we believe and why. But the Putkammer Castle narrative is just one piece in a rich literary cabinet: this issue also features travel writing, cultural criticism, and verse that together paint a portrait of a nation processing trauma through the sanctuary of serious reading. For historians and literature lovers, holding this issue is holding a specific Tuesday in November 1865.