Behind The Atlantic’s November 2025 Issue Cover

The Atlantic’s November 2025 issue commemorates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. For our cover image, the artist Joe McKendry painted a tableau of figures drawn from the stories in the issue. Some of the figures will be instantly recognizable—­Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson—and some of the depictions are based on historical portraiture. The image of Paul Revere, for instance, is an homage to John Singleton Copley’s painting of the silversmith and Patriot, which hangs in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Other figures will be less familiar. Standing beside George Washington is a man he enslaved. Like thousands of enslaved people, Harry Washington abandoned the plantation when the war began and fought for Great Britain. No image of this Washington survives. For such figures, McKendry imagined their visages, taking cues from written descriptions when possible. No occasion would have brought all of these people together in the same room (certainly, it is difficult to imagine King George in the same room as the other George). They represent different sides of the war, of the period’s political ferment, and of early American society itself. One figure existed only in a work of fiction. But together they convey the ambition of this special issue: to capture the Revolutionary era in all of its complexity, contradictions, and ingenuity.

1. James Madison  2. King George III
3. George Washington  4. Harry Washington
5. Abigail Adams  6. Paul Revere
7. Benjamin Franklin  8. Benedict Arnold
9. Pontiac  10. William Franklin
11. Thomas Jefferson  12. Thomas Paine
13. Robert Hemmings  14. Prince Hall
15. James Armistead Lafayette  16. Eliza Schuyler
17. Patrick Henry  18. Priscilla Timbers
19. Rip Van Winkle  20. Alexander Hamilton
21. Ralph Waldo Emerson  22. Lord Dunmore
23. John Adams

Explore the November 2025 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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