Since its founding in 1865, The Nation has consistently acted as a brake on the train that certain social malefactors regularly try to hijack and point toward the nearest war. We have held fast to our “Nation Ideals”— from racial justice to feminism, from environmentalism to civil liberties—throughout our 150-year history. This month, we’re resurfacing material from the archives on the subject of “waging peace.” Above, you’ll find a multimedia timeline that presents that history, complete with archival photographs and video.

Research by Richard Kreitner and Stacie Williams
Design by Stacie Williams

Check out all of our timelines! 

On a fair economy for all:

Radical Histories: A Fair Economy For All, 1865 – 2011.

On environmentalism:

Radical Histories: The Fight for a Sustainable Future, 1872 – 2014.

On feminism, sex, and gender:
Part I, From Sojourner Truth’s ‘Ain’t I A Woman?’ in 1851 to FDA approval of the birth control pill in 1960.
Part II, From Helen Gurley Brown in 1960 to the criminalization of pregnancy in 2014.

On race and civil rights:
Part I, From the Memphis riots of 1866 to the first anti-lynching conference, in New York City, in 1919.
Part II, From the “Red Summer” of racial violence in Chicago, in 1919, to Rosa Parks’s bus protest, in 1955.
Part III, From the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968.
Part IV, From the ban on segregation in housing, in 1968, to freedom for Nelson Mandela, in 1990.
Part V, From the LA riots of 1992 to the release of Selma, in 2015.