Historian Yoni Appelbaum is the New Politics Editor at The Atlantic.Com

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Yoni Appelbaum

Those of you who read The Way of Improvement Leads Home may remember a post I did this past weekend about wandering the book exhibit at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. In that post I mentioned that I had run into the new politics editor at TheAtlantic.Com, but I was unable to mention his name until a formal announcement was made.

I am now happy to report that the new politics editor at TheAtlantic.Com is Yoni Appelbaum.  I met Yoni a few years ago in Columbia, South Carolina when we both sat on a panel (with Chris Cantwell and Beth Pardoe) on historians and the digital turn.  The occasion was the biennial meeting of the now-defunct Historical Society.  A few years ago I also blogged about Yoni’s rise from “blog commentator” to Atlantic correspondent.  You can also see him in action here.


At this year’s AHA meeting Yoni was hard at work recruiting potential writers for TheAtlantic.Com: 


When I bumped into him in the book exhibit I asked him about the above tweet.  When he told me about his new position it all made sense. Congrats, Yoni.  Here is a taste of the press release from TheAtlantic.Com:

Appelbaum is a social and cultural historian with a Ph.D. in American History from Brandeis University, and joins The Atlantic from Harvard where he’s been a lecturer on history and literature. He had an unconventional start with The Atlantic: as a frequent commenter on the site, specifically to posts by national correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates. Appelbaum’s comments caught the attention of Coates and The Atlantic’s editors, who invited him to become a contributing writer.

“Yoni was essential to the last two or three pieces I wrote for the magazine—reading them and offering rigorous academic critique,” says Coates. “He’s proof that there is wisdom everywhere: that it’s possible to find someone like him in a comments section online. We’re getting someone who has been a part of The Atlantic for a long time. There’s no one like him in the world of journalism; he’s an original.”
What can you do with a history degree?  Become the politics editor for The Atlantic.

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