Published by Harper & Brothers from 1857 until 1916, it featured foreign and domestic news, fiction, essays on many subjects, and humor, alongside illustrations.

The monthly publication featured established authors such as Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, and within several years, demand for the magazine was great enough to sustain a weekly edition.

[3] He also drew the legendary character of Santa Claus; his version became strongly associated with the figure, who was popularized as part of Christmas customs in the late nineteenth century.

Harper's Weekly was the most widely read journal in the United States during the American Civil War era of the mid-19th century.

A July 1863 article in The Weekly on the escaped slave Gordon included an illustration taken from a photograph of his back, severely scarred from whippings.

[citation needed] Beginning in 1863 until his death in 1892, George William Curtis, one of the founders of the Republican Party, served as the magazine's political editor.

In the 1870s, the cartoonist Thomas Nast began an aggressive campaign in the journal against the corrupt New York political leader William "Boss" Tweed.

[10] Curtis believed that mockery by caricature should be reserved for Democrats, and did not approve of Nast's cartoons assailing Republicans such as Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner, who opposed policies of the Grant administration.

[11] In 1884, however, Curtis and Nast agreed that they could not support the Republican candidate James G. Blaine, whose association with corruption was anathema to them.

"[15] On January 14, 1893, Harper's Weekly became the first American magazine to publish a Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box".

Harper's editor George Harvey was an early supporter of Woodrow Wilson's candidacy, proposing him for the Presidency at a Lotos Club dinner in 1906.