Lewis H. Lapham spent thirty years editing Harper's Magazine, where he invented the Harper's Index and transformed one of America's oldest publications into a vehicle for some of the sharpest political and cultural writing of its era. When he retired in 2006, he was seventy-one years old and had no intention of resting. Instead, he founded Lapham's Quarterly, a publication built on a single, magnificent premise: that history is the root of all education, and that the best way to understand the present is to let the past speak for itself.
Each issue of the Quarterly took a single theme — war, money, religion, youth, food, time — and assembled dozens of primary-source texts spanning three thousand years of human thought: Thucydides alongside Mark Twain, Confucius next to Joan Didion, Shakespeare beside Mahatma Gandhi. No text ran longer than six pages. Each was abridged rather than paraphrased, letting the original voice ring clear. Lapham introduced every issue with an essay of his own — elegant, contrarian, and frequently devastating in its critique of American power.
The magazine earned a Library Journal award for Best New Magazine Launch in 2008. McSweeney's called it an idea they wished they'd thought of first. By the mid-2010s it had a circulation of forty thousand. But Lapham's health declined, and in November 2023 the Quarterly went on hiatus. Lapham died in Rome in July 2024, at eighty-nine. In March 2025, Bard College acquired the publication, and a team of veteran editors began planning a relaunch — proof that the magazine Lapham built was designed to outlast even its extraordinary creator.
There is nothing else like Lapham's Quarterly in American publishing — a magazine that treated history not as nostalgia but as the sharpest tool available for cutting through the noise of the present.
<a href="https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/">Visit Lapham's Quarterly