On Thursday July 6, 1865,  just three months after the end of the Civil War, the first issue of The Nation  hit the newsstands. The Nation was founded by Anglo-Irish journalist E.L. Godkin and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, with financial support from scholar and cultural critic Charles Eliot Norton and abolitionist James Miller McKim. The goal of the Nation was to publish an American magazine where more thorough discussions of politics, race, freedmen, the south, the economy, and art and literary criticism could take place. 

The entire run of the Nation, from its first issue in 1865 to the present (save for the most recent month) is online through The Nation Archive, which is available only at the four research centers of the New York Public Library. Patrons can search for articles by author, title, or full text keyword. One can also browse through each issue for a more serendipitous experience. All articles are available in pdf, so one can view the article as it appeared in the magazine, with the option to print, email, or download. 

In reading through the archive, one is reminded how many of the 19th and 20th century's greatest minds wrote for the Nation: Albert Einstein on the 1932 Disarmament Conference in Geneva ("Without disarmament there can be no lasting peace,")  W.E.B. Du Bois on his decision not to vote in the 1956 election ("There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say,")  Edward Said on the role of the intellectual ("The intellectual's role generally is to uncover and elucidate the contest, to challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power, wherever and whenever possible,") and Mary McCarthy on her birthplace, Washington State ("The state of Washington is ferment; it is wild, comic, theatrical, dishonest, hopeful; but it is not revolutionary.")

The Nation also regularly published series and roundtable discussions.  In a series of articles in August and September of 1934, Joseph Wood Krutch asked Is Europe a Success?  His article provoked a roundtable response in the October 3, 1934 issue from Albert Einstein, H.L. Menken, Bertrand Russell, James Burnham, and Aldous Huxley.  Martin Luther King, Jr. penned a yearly report documenting the American civil rights movement from 1961 until 1966, and consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote about automobile safety in 1959, 1963, 1965, and 1969. Some discussions were less weighty: When We Americans Dine examined the American dinner, which, to one contributor, was considered as mysterious as "Miss Stein's Tender Buttons."

For Library users interested in more recent content, access to the Nation from January 11, 1975 to the present (save for the most recent month) is also available through the online resource Academic Search Premier, which is accessible at all NYPL locations and from home with a NYPL card. 

For more information about the history of the Nation, I recommend A History of American Magazines by Frank Luther Mott, Routledge's The Encyclopedia of American Journalism, and One Hundred Years of the Nation, edited by Henry M. Christman.  The database American National Biography has short, but thorough, biographies of Godkin, Olmsted, Norton, and McKim.  For anthologies of Nation writings, the Library has The Best of the Nation: Selections from the Independent Magazine of Politics and Culture (2000) and The Nation, 1865-1990: Selections from the Independent Magazine of Politics and Culture (1990).  And for a deeper dive into James Miller McKim's life, the Library's Manuscripts and Archives Division is home to the Maloney Collection of McKim-Garrison Family Papers.