Abstract

The 'Nation' and Its Contributors

The article focuses on some of the contributors to the periodical, the Nation. Few periodicals in the history of journalism can claim, like the Nation, to have preserved their original features essentially unchanged during fifty years of continuous existence. The Nation of the present day may safely challenge comparison with the number, which, on July 6, 1865, was issued by journalist E.L. Godkin, as editor-in-chief and Wendell Phillips Garrison, as literary editor. Perhaps not many subsequent issues have surpassed the initial number in solidity, maturity or judgment and attractiveness of style. Half-a-dozen men, the most conspicuous of whom was Charles Eliot Norton, represented the imposing list of contributors, which in the course of time came to include the foremost names in American literature and science, in the first number. To him, to journalist Frederick Law Olmsted, and to journalist James Miller McKim, the founding of the Nation is principally due.