The Nation Magazine

Articles from The Nation Magazine

The Black-Shirt Revolution (The Nation, 1922)

A report by Carleton Beals on Italy’s new order:

The strong state has arrived in Italy. It has been on the road ever since the failure of the factory seizures in September, 1920.

Ludendorff’s Apology (The Nation, 1920)

A second and far more thorough book review of My Story, by German General Erich von Ludendorff (1865 – 1937).

When the bitterness of these days has passed, historians will very likely classify Ludendorff as first among the military geniuses of his time. But his ‘own story’ will have importance principally because of certain sidelights it casts upon his motives and psychology.


A shorter review of Ludendorff’s memoir can be read here.


Read about Ludendorff’s collusion with Hitler…

The James Agee Review of It’s a Wonderful Life (The Nation, 1947)

James Agee, the film reviewer for The Nation (1942 – 1948), was charmed by the warmth of It’s a Wonderful Life
and believed that it was an admirable and well-crafted piece of film making; he nonetheless came away feeling like he’d been sold a bill of goods and rejected the movie primarily because he believed that films created in the Atomic Age should reflect the pessimism that created the era.

Anticipating Multiculturalism (The Nation, 1915)

Horace M. Kallen (1888 – 1974) was a deep thinker who questioned the practice of Americanization (ie. assimilation). In this 1915 article, Kallen contended that although immigrants to American shores are required to develop allegiances to certain self-evident beliefs that are embraced throughout our republic – but outside of that, there is no reason that immigrants should not be able to maintain their own ethnic and cultural identities. In the Eighties, those who embraced this line of thinking preferred to call America a salad bowl as opposed to a melting pot.

The Titanic Disaster (The Nation, 1912)

Not long after the Titanic catastrophe was made known to the world there were many rumors and half truths that had to be sorted out and recognized as such in order to fully understand the full scope of the catastrophe; the editors of The Nation printed this article which contributed to that effort:

…two terrible, damning facts stand out: the first, that the ship was speeding through an ice-field of the presence of which its officers were fully aware; the second, is that every life could readily have been saved had there been boats and rafts enough to keep people afloat in a clear, starry night on an exceptionally smooth Atlantic sea. Both these facts are indisputable.

As for the lifeboats, these expensive affairs that could cost the large sum of $425.00 apiece – there were but twenty of them in addition to a few rafts…

Just Another Classified Ad from Dixie… (The Nation, 1927)

The attached file is a digital facsimile of a classified ad that was once posted in a Georgia newspaper long after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed into law. The editors at THE NATION saw fit to title the notice as an interesting little advertisement when they reproduced it six months later on their pages. Yet, for the Southerners who set the type-face, applied the ink, delivered the paper and subscribed, the ad was typical of so many other classifieds that had appeared during the past one hundred and fifty years, and it was not, as the Yankees put it:

…the request of someone who never heard of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

An Historic Telegram Addressed to General Sherman (The Nation, 1912)

The Nation reported in 1912 that a telegram of great historical importance had been put up for auction (N.B.: the Twenty-First Century equivalent of a telegram is a text message). The telegram was addressed to General William Techumseh Sherman and signed by General U.S. Grant and it clearly gives Sherman free reign to ravage the countryside as he marched.


Click here to read the chronologies of the American Civil War.


To read the story behind Lincoln’s beard, click here.

Lincoln and Lee in 1918 (The Nation, 1918)

On the first anniversary marking the American intervention into the First World War Charles Payne of Grenell College, Iowa, wrote to the editors at The Nation and cautioned his fellow-Americans to remember the conduct and humility of Civil War General Robert E. Lee.


Click here to read about the heavy influence religion had in the Rebel states during the American Civil War.

The German Atrocities that Never Were (The Nation, 1923)

The post war period was the time when the press had to start figuring out what was true and what was false in all matters involving the reports that their assorted papers and magazines had printed during the conflict. Admiral Sims of the U.S. Navy caused a stir when he went on record announcing that a particularly odious policy observed by the Germans, widely believed to have been true, was in fact, a falsehood:

I stated…that barring the case of the hospital ship Llandovery Castle I did not know of any case where a German submarine commander had fired upon the boats of a torpedoed vessel…

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