2008

• Remembering Studs

  André Schiffrin : Cultural Criticism & Analysis

  Studs Terkel's longtime publisher looks back on the historian's remarkable career.

• Studs

  Victor Navasky : Non-Fiction

  Remembering our national griot, the bearer of stories of people, ordinary and extraordinary.

• Studs Terkel: The Power of His Prose

  Dennis Kucinich : Non-Fiction

  He was our Boswell, our Whitman, our Sandburg. He could get people to open up and share their innermost thoughts and dreams.

• 

  McCain and the Meltdown

  : Banks & Banking

  Robert Sherrill's pathbreaking 1990 exposé of the savings and loan scandal sheds light on John McCain's deregulatory politics--and our current financial crisis.

• 

  Paul Newman

  Victor Navasky

  He was funny, he was thoughtful, he was committed and, in the end, he was a friend, period.

• 

  Obama and King

  Adele Oltman : Religion

  As Obama accepts his party's presidential nomination on the forty-fifth anniversary of King's most famous speech, a historian looks beyond the obvious analogies.

• 1988: A Charismatic Candidate

  The Editors : Convention Coverage

  Flawed and flamboyant, the charismatic Jesse Jackson wasn't the perfect candidate, but his idealism led The Nation to endorse his bid for the White House.

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  1968: The Hilton Hotel Incident

  : Convention Coverage

  While the whole world was watching, this is what Chicago's finest did.

• 1968: The Bitter Legacy of LBJ

  Carey McWilliams : Convention Coverage

  It was a rigged convention, and the Chicago police were spoiling for a fight.

• 

  1932: The Democratic Trough at Chicago

  Oswald Garrison Villard : Convention Coverage

  As they nominated FDR, Democratic conventioneers were more interested in grandstanding against prohibition than facing the nation's economic crisis.

• 1921: Alice Paul Pulls the Strings

  Freda Kirchwey : Convention Coverage

  At the National Women's Party convention, party leaders spurned black women who sought to be included in the suffragist agenda.

• 

  1908: The First Denver Convention

  The Editors : Convention Coverage

  When Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan as their presidential candidate, The Nation was skeptical.

• 1984: The Left, The Democrats & the Future

  Andrew Kopkind & Alexander Cockburn : Convention Coverage

  Democrats seek the center--and lose their moorings.

• By Bus Through the Middle West

  Oswald Garrison Villard : U.S. Economy

  A tour of the heartland in the depths of the Great Depression.

• Hamilton Explains

  The Editors

  How Alexander Hamilton "fell into as difficult a position as a public man has ever known, and extricated himself by means which show how much the conventional standards of morals have changed in America since his time."

• Squire Willie

  Robert Sherrill : Journalists & Journalism

  Surveying the life and accomplishments of the "late" William F. Buckley Jr.

• The Faith of Roosevelt

  The Editors : Economic Policy

  "To achieve 'social values more noble than mere monetary profit,' to 'keep the money changers permanently out of the temple of our civilization'...would be to transform America."

• Issues and Men--and a Woman: Frances Perkins

  Oswald Garrison Villard : Feminism & Women

  "Here is a lost cause no longer lost, but come to triumphant success, and if the pioneers of that cause are looking down upon this scene, there will be rejoicing in heaven on the fourth day of March."

• The Two Nuernbergs

  Peter de Mendelssohn : History

  Awaiting trial for the Nazi atrocities were "twenty shabby men... a ragged, spiritless, motley crew of second-rate characters": Ribbentrop, Hiss, Göring...

• Lenin, Trotzky and Gorky

  Bertrand Russell : Russia

  "I went to Russia believing myself a communist, but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts...of every creed so firmly held that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery."

• An Unconventional Convention

  Oswald Garrison Villard : Political Parties

  On Saturday, June 27, 1924, "men and women suddenly rose up after days of utterly degraded and demoralizing vaudeville performances to declaim with passion about two big subjects."

• The Long War of Wayne Felde

  Doug Magee : Vietnam War

  How a Vietnam vet wound up on Death Row.

• Wall Street's Crisis

  The Editors : U.S. Economy

  It was a record day in the history of the Stock Exchange and, coming as a climax to more than three weeks of declining prices, it was most disastrous in hammering down security values.

• 'The Mississippi Challenge'

  George Slaff : Racism & Discrimination

  Black people in the state were "regularly and systematically" denied the vote by "intimidation, harassment, economic reprisal, property damage, terrorization, violence and illegal and unconstitutional registration procedures."

• Jinnah's New Republic

  Andrew Roth : Pakistan

  Seldom has a state been created under such contradictory pressures or with such a load of full-grown problems.