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The year 2015 marks The Nation’s 150th anniversary (see here for a schedule of live events). This week, to celebrate the occasion, we’re publishing a very special anniversary issue, one of the longest in the magazine’s long history.

This issue, which I co-edited with D.D. Guttenplan, our London correspondent, weaves together voices from The Nation’s rich history with contributors writing about the current cultural and political moment. In a rich series archival excerpts, we reprint some of the best that was thought and said in our pages—much of it inspiring and eerily prescient, some of it shocking. We have also included a few selections that turned out to be less than prophetic.

Interspersed with the archival excerpts are three sections of new material. In the first, “The Nation and the Nation,” writers explore the magazine’s outsized influence on everything from poetry to feminism, radicalism to right-wing conservatism, Cuba to coverage of the arts. In “Fierce Urgencies,” contributors consider topics like the politics of fear, from anticommunism in the 1950s to Islamophobia today, and the relationship of the left to power—in movements, in electoral politics and in government. Finally, in “Radical Futures,” writers and activists map out new strategies for radicals, progressives and liberals seeking to expand the terms of our public discussion and look beyond the present moment.

Change is inevitable, but the one constant in The Nation’s history has been faith—not in political parties or policies, but in what can happen when you tell people the truth. It is this notion that has sustained The Nation since its founding: that and the idea that there are always alternatives—in history, in politics, in life—that would make our country and the world a more humane, just and secure place.

Our very first issue described “the conflict of the ages, the great strife between the few and the many, between privilege and equality, between law and power, between opinion and the sword.” This anniversary issue is a record of the last 150 years of that conflict—and as long as The Nation is around, that fight will go on. With your help, we’ll be fighting for another 150 years and beyond!

—Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor and Publisher

Download a PDF of the full special issue.

150 Years of Telling the Truth, by Katrina vanden Heuvel

The Founding Mission Statement of America’s Oldest Weekly Magazine

A Message From President Barack Obama

The Nation and the Nation: Radicals, rebels, poets, pioneers, feminists, fantasists and other voices from our hidden history.

Fierce Urgencies: From the way we were then to the way we live now.

Radical Futures: Harbingers of change, peeks over the horizon, maps of Utopia—and other strategies for keeping hope alive.

Toward a Third Reconstruction: A Conversation with Eric Foner, Darryl Pinckney, Mychal Denzel Smith, Isabel Wilkerson and Patricia J. Williams.

Why We Can’t Wait: Visions for a radical future, from StudentNation contributors and former interns.

Excerpts from The Nation’s Archives, 1865–2015

The Nation: A Biography, Part I, Part II, Part III

Columns

A Wake-Up Call for US Liberals, by Eric Alterman

Irresponsible Power, by Gary Younge

Letters to the Editor

Testimonials to The Nation

Poems From the Archive

Puzzle No. 3358

* * *

The Nation and the Nation



Radicals, rebels, poets, pioneers, feminists, fantasists and other voices from our hidden history.

Eric Foner: Freedom’s Song Illustrated by Steve Brodner

JoAnn Wypijewski: Night Thoughts

Rick Perlstein: Going All the Way Illustrated by Eugène Mihaesco

Elizabeth Pochoda: How to Lose Friends and Influence People

Ange Mlinko: The Dream Life of Desire

Betsy Reed and Katha Pollitt: Spreading Feminism Far and Wide

Frances Jetter: Works on Paper

Peter Kornbluh: Cuba Libre

David Corn: How I Got That Story

Calvin Trillin: Cruising to Port

Maria Margaronis: Radical Hope

Ariel Dorfman: Separated at Birth Illustrated by Yuko Shimizu

* * *

Fierce Urgencies



From the way we were then to the way we live now.

Marilynne Robinson: A Sense of Obligation

Victor Navasky: The Roads Not Taken

Victor Juhasz: His Master’s Voice

Walden Bello: The Left in Power

Kai Bird: Revisiting ‘Myths About the Middle East’: The Case for Disengagement

Art Spiegelman: Drawing the Line

Michael Tomasky: Lesser-Evilism We Can Believe In

Robert L. Borosage: Occupy and Organize

Michael Sorkin: Weird Bedfellows

Helen Lewis: Game Not Over

Tom Tomorrow: All the Right Enemies

Moustafa Bayoumi: ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’

Michael Moore: Michael Moore for President

* * *

Radical Futures



Harbingers of change, peeks over the horizon, maps of Utopia—and other strategies for keeping hope alive.

Toni Morrison: No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear

Rebecca Solnit: Unpredictable Weather Illustrated by Eric Drooker

Jack O’Dell: Beginning to See the Light

Noam Chomsky: Killing the Commons Illustrated by Milton Glaser

Stuart Klawans: Traces of Light

Gene Seymour: Future Sounds

Dave Zirin: A World of Sports Worth Fighting For

E.L. Doctorow: Home Illustrated by Mirko Ilic

Joel Rogers: Productive Democracy

Kshama Sawant: Socialist Politics: The Heart of Rebuilding the Left

Michael Massing: An Investigative Blueprint Illustrated by Marshall Arisman

Michael Massing: Unburying the Lede

David Cole: Privacy 2.0: Surveillance in the Digital Age

John Nichols: Move to Amend

Bhaskar Sunkara: A Red by Any Other Name

Jon Wiener: It’s Time to End Tuition at Public Universities—and Abolish Student Debt

Thomas Geoghegan: The Big Fix

Amy Wilentz: The Future of a Failed State

Mark Gevisser: Engendered

* * *

Excerpts from The Nation’s Archives, 1865–2015



Founded by abolitionists to finish the job of Emancipation, The Nation became a moribund defender of the status quo. But its firm anti-imperialism, and one crusading editor, brought it back to life.

1865–1875: When Corporations Became America’s Aristocracy

Henry James: Mr. Walt Whitman

Frederick Law Olmsted: Chicago in Distress

1875–1885: Custer’s Last Stand and the Power of Tammany Hall

E.L. Godkin: The Sources of Communism

1885–1895: Anarchists Are Vagabonds and Ruffians and Threaten Everything We Most Value on Earth

E.L. Godkin and Rochelle Gurstein: Clickbait Has Plagued Journalism for 125 Years

The Editors: The New Football

1895–1905: When the American Empire Was Born

Horace White and Elinor Langer: American Imperialism: This Is When It All Began

1905–1915: Henry James’s Obscurities

Oswald Garrison Villard: What Would Lincoln Think of Race Relations on His 100th Birthday?

Simeon Strunsky and Richard Kreitner: When the Constitution Becomes The Last Resort of Scoundrels



From World War I to Vietnam, from the red scare to McCarthyism, The Nation stood firm for civil liberties and civil rights, even when that meant being banned—or standing alone.

1915–1925: Radicals in a Time of Hysteria

Floyd Dell and Michelle Goldberg: Can Men and Women Be Friends?

William MacDonald and Mayor Bill de Blasio: If We Repossessed Empty Homes, Homelessness Would Be Over

1925–1935: Is Art Possible in the United States?

Langston Hughes and Touré: Loving Blackness in a Nation Ruled by White Supremacy

Albert Einstein: Was Europe a Success?

Emma Goldman and Vivian Gornick: When the World Became a Huge Penitentiary

1935–1945: The Establishment of a Warless World Must Be Our Goal

John Dos Passos: Big Parade—1936

John Steinbeck: On the Violent Repression of the Fight for Migrant Workers’ Rights

I.F. Stone: For the Jews—Life or Death?

1945–1955: We Face a Choice Between One World or None

James Agee: The Salt of the Earth

Hannah Arendt: French Existentialism

Jean-Paul Sartre: Americans and Their Myths

Bernard Fall and Frances FitzGerald: The Reporter Who Warned Us Not to Invade Vietnam 10 Years Before the Gulf of Tonkin

Ray Bradbury: What Science Fiction Teaches Us About Reality

1955–1965: Down the Road of Folly

W.E.B. Du Bois: I Won’t Vote

Ralph Nader: The Safe Car You Can’t Buy

Howard Zinn and Paula J. Giddings: When Respectability Was No Longer Respectable, and Virtue Required Acting Out, Not Leaning In

Jessica Mitford: The Indignant Generation



A forum for debate between radicals and liberals in an age of austerity, surveillance and endless war, The Nation has long had one foot inside the establishment and one outside it.

1965–1975: How To Tell The Rebels Have Won

Wendell Berry and Wen Stephenson: The Gospel According to Wendell Berry

Martin Luther King Jr.: The Last Steep Ascent

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward: The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty

Hunter S. Thompson: The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders

James Baldwin and Carrie Mae Weems : James Baldwin: A Report From Occupied Territory

1975–1985: Standing in Solidarity Against Jackbooted Oppressors

William Appleman Williams and Greg Grandin: Is America Possible Without Empire?

Gore Vidal: ‘Some’ Jews & ‘the’ Gays

Barbara Ehrenreich: Can Women and Men Live Together Again?

E.P. Thompson: East, West—Is There a Third Way?

1985–1995: The Radical Reformation of American Politics and Culture

Christopher Hitchens: Terrorism and Its Discontents

Alexander Cockburn: The Stars Were Their Alibi

Alice Walker: What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?

Edward Miliband: Maggie Stumbles

Katha Pollitt: Are Women Morally Superior to Men?

Tony Kushner: A Socialism of the Skin

Adolph Reed Jr.: Adolph Reed Destroys ‘The Bell Curve’

1995–2005: Our Enemies Cannot Defeat Us—Only We Can

Edward Said: There Cannot Be Peace and Security Until the Cause of Palestinian Suffering Is Addressed

Marshall Berman: What Does ‘The Communist Manifesto’ Have to Offer 150 Years After Its Publication?

Mark Hertsgaard: A Global Green Deal

2005–2015: This All Seems Eerily Familiar

* * *

Poems From the Archives

Robert Frost: The Bear

Sylvia Plath: Two Views of a Cadaver Room

Frank O’Hara: Present

William Butler Yeats: Hound Voice

W.H. Auden: The Fall of Rome

Claude McKay: Home Song

John Berryman: Dream Song

Allen Ginsberg: Now and Forever

Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things

Adrienne Rich: Parting

Anne Sexton: The Starry Night

LeRoi Jones: Tight Rope

Elizabeth Bishop: Varick Street

Marianne Moore: The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing

William Carlos Williams: The Injury

Mahmoud Darwish: And We Love Life

Magazine issue cover: art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA. New York, NY Jasper Johns (b. 1930). Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 30 5/8 x 45 1/2 x 4 5/8 in. (77 .8 x 115.6 x 11.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchased with funds from the Gilman Foundation Inc., the Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, Laura Lee Whittier Woods, Howard Lipman and Ed Downe, in honor of the museum’s fiftieth anniversary 80.32 Digital lmage © Whitney Museum of American Art, NY