On Saturday, December 10, 1853, as the January issue of Harper’s Magazine was being printed, a plumber repairing some water pipes in the pressroom lit his lamp and tossed the kindling into what he took to be a pan of water, but was in fact camphene, a flammable liquid used for cleaning press rollers. The resulting fire destroyed the entire Harper & Brothers compound—a collection of five-story buildings in downtown Manhattan. Though miraculously no one was killed, and only one person seriously injured, not much else was spared. The operations for typesetting and electrotyping; for presswork, drying, folding, stitching, and binding; for storage, sales, and delivery; the editorial offices—all gone. Also among the casualties were all copies of the January issue, as well as the writers’ manuscripts. Total damages were estimated at more than $1 million (about $41 million today).

As the magazine’s 175th anniversary arrives, it’s a small comfort to think that we’re not literally burning to the ground. But the challenges facing media are immense. Trust in the press is at a record low, perhaps most worryingly among the young—a Gallup analysis last fall concluded that only 26 percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine said they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the media, as opposed to 43 percent of those aged sixty-five and older. The president, meanwhile, has launched aggressive defamation lawsuits against ABC, CBS, and the Des Moines Register, and barred AP reporters from the White House while granting access to sympathetic outlets such as the Right Side Broadcasting Network; his new head of the Federal Communications Commission has launched investigations into ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS. For print publications, the cost of production is historically high, and pay for writers is historically low. Journalism is among the most regretted college majors. Audiences for traditional news media are fewer than ever and more distracted, as they silo off into ever-narrower and more specialized Substacks, podcasts, and livestreams. Everywhere there is a pervasive feeling of rapid change, most of it for the worse.

Are these extinction-level events? Harper’s has faced destruction many times before. Some brushes with death were brought about by horrific accidents like the fire; others were financial in nature. (“I think,” one Harper’s editor said in 1980, “that during its one hundred and thirty years of existence, it hasn’t made money in more than ten of those years.”) Still others stemmed from world-historical shifts in the way that society consumes information. But faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, Harper’s has always—almost unbelievably—returned from the brink.

The fire struck during the magazine’s first great flowering. Though the Harper brothers had started the magazine in June 1850 “as a tender” to their printing and publishing business (it was at first “a sort of undigested Reader’s Digest of foreign periodical literature,” as one former editor put it), almost immediately it began to form into something more unusual and broader in scope, complementing the serializations with more original articles by American writers, so that it could plausibly be called the first national monthly magazine of general interest. By 1854, circulation had jumped from an initial 50,000 to 130,000. “To a family in a steepled town on the Erie Canal, or on a remote Ohio farm,” wrote the Harper’s editor Frederick Lewis Allen in 1950, the magazine was:

a welcome messenger from the great world, bringing information and ideas and entertainment to be devoured eagerly beside the open fireplace or the Franklin stove of an evening, by the light of a whale-oil lamp.

In this early era of Harper’s history, one might have found a diary by General Sherman’s aide-de-camp, George Ward Nichols, describing his march to the sea, or Horace Greeley’s memories of crossing the plains in the 1850s (already, by the article’s publication in 1869, full of a judgmental nostalgia for the times when someone who wanted to go West couldn’t do so in the comfort and style of a train).

On the evening of the fire, the four Harper brothers, James, John, Wesley, and Fletcher (or, as they were known to the staff, the Mayor, the Colonel, the Captain, and the Major), resolved to rebuild the entire company. A new headquarters would be constructed on the site of the old—this time out of newly perfected, fire-resistant iron-frame materials. They wired contributors, asking them to rush them fresh duplicate copy. Printing was farmed out to other shops, and the brothers produced the January issue only about two weeks late. The firm’s renewed success allowed the magazine time and space to continue refining itself, coming to maturity under the editorship of Henry Mills Alden, who served for fifty years and published such writers as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Mark Twain.

The magazine’s next brush with death came as it collided with the onset of the Progressive Era. While Harper’s under Alden reached arguably its highest level of literary achievement, it was less concerned with the interests of the average American. The magazine’s tone, Allen noted, was often that of “an aristocrat reminding other aristocrats of the regrettable conditions among the unfortunate if picturesque members of the lower orders.” By the 1890s, as rage and dissatisfaction with Gilded Age inequality began to boil over, publishers discovered that if they lowered the price of a magazine and replaced the genteel Victorian items with more salacious content—including, but not limited to, investigations revealing corporate abuses, political corruption, and dangerous working conditions—sales would grow and advertising would follow. But by the turn of the century, Harper’s was shedding both, and its competitors—members of the so-called quality group, like The Century Magazine, The World’s Work, and Scribner’s—would soon begin to die off, one by one.

Around the same time, the larger company itself started to founder, unsettled by the recent depression and the difficulties of running such a sprawling, integrated operation (as well as a profusion of third-generation Harper family members drawing exorbitant salaries). At their wits’ end and nearly bankrupt, the management of Harper & Brothers turned to J. Pierpont Morgan in the fall of 1896 and asked him to engineer a rescue of the company. Morgan took on the project. “The downfall of the House of Harper,” he later said, “would be a national calamity.” J. P. Morgan & Co. reorganized the seventy-nine-year-old Harper partnership as a corporation, but didn’t, as it usually did, impose new management on the company. By 1899, the House of Harper again faced default, and its directors put it into receivership. (When the news reached him, William Dean Howells—a frequent contributor—said that “it was as if I had read that the government of the United States had failed.”)

It was at this moment that control passed from the hands of the Harper family to George M. Harvey, a former managing editor of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, whom the board hired to run the company. Through a combination of austerity and de-integration—the printing plant was abandoned, publications like Harper’s Bazar and Harper’s Weekly were sold (one survived, with an extra a, and thrived; the other didn’t)—the magazine was saved. It was also saved by Morgan’s generosity; the total sum he gave to the enterprise over the years amounted to $2.5 million, or about $90 million today. He never asked the publisher to repay it.

But the problem of how to deal with the magazine’s struggles in the era of mass circulation remained. This was solved by a new editor, Thomas Bucklin Wells, who succeeded Alden in 1919. Wells aimed the magazine’s coverage squarely at the intellectually curious reader—no matter the income bracket—who cared for the general national well-being. His magazine, in the spirit of the times, focused more on contemporary controversies—concerns about the decline of religion in the face of rapid technological advancements, for instance, or the changing role of women in society—and, as the Twenties wore on into the Thirties, included increasing coverage of international affairs, reflecting readers’ burgeoning interest in global politics. The magazine survived once more and, under successive editors, at times reached new heights. It would not face extinction again for nearly sixty years.

The August 1980 issue of Harper’s arrived with a note to subscribers announcing that the issue they held in their hands would be the last, and that further publication had been suspended by its owner, the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Company, which had acquired the magazine as part of a merger in the Sixties. Citing steadily rising costs of production and distribution, the company concluded that it “would no longer be prudent for us to continue.” “During the 15 years our company has published Harper’s,” the note read, “we have been proud to provide the country with an independent and sometimes unconventional editorial voice in the world of ideas and public affairs.”

This was the culmination of a battle that had begun some twenty years earlier. Having survived the challenges posed by mass circulation, the magazine now faced the financial threat of television, which steadily siphoned off both advertisers and readers from general-interest magazines. But there was more at play. “The immense increase of available information has had the paradoxical effect of reducing the norm of literacy,” wrote editor Lewis H. Lapham of the magazine’s predicament:

Instead of bringing people together, the sophistication of the technology forces them further apart, and they lose the capacity to speak a common language. To the extent that the society as a whole expands and complicates its acquisition of knowledge, so also the individual members of the society find less and less to say to one another.

As the postwar boom produced more and more Americans with both college degrees and disposable income, a profusion of special-interest publications arose, while magazines that served a broad national audience had largely vanished. “Although it is impossible to quarrel with the benefits that such magazines confer on their readers,” wrote Lapham, “I cannot help thinking that the subsequent division of audiences has had an inhibiting effect on the public expression of diverse opinions.”

But the roots of this magazine’s brief death were also, ultimately, a source of inspiration. The current publisher, John R. MacArthur, convinced his father, Roderick, to persuade the board of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to rescue the magazine before it missed an issue. Retooled as a nonprofit, the new Harper’s Magazine Foundation resolved to resist the trend toward specialization by remaining a generalist publication, bringing together various perspectives that would otherwise remain isolated in separate spheres of discourse. By doing so, it aimed to restore the sense of a unified national conversation.

Many of the problems that beset Harper’s forty, sixty, one hundred, or one hundred seventy-five years ago—shifting forms of media consumption, fragmenting audiences, and spiraling costs—are still around, and many have grown only more acute. But the more pronounced these problems become—that is, the more it feels as if the industry itself is in the midst of a protracted near-death experience—the more urgently we need what Harper’s hopes to provide: perspective and coherence; the capacity to see things whole amid the noise of a thousand screaming headlines; a theater of ideas where diverse viewpoints can engage in sustained conversation; thoughtful curation and synthesis that help readers navigate information overload; the pleasures of art, literary fiction, and criticism. These are the aims, Allen wrote seventy-five years ago, “toward which we grope—forever beset, needless to say, by a sense of our shortcomings.”