Today in history—and how The Nation covered it.
In The Nation Jonathan Schell laid to rest any comparisons between Clinton’s crimes, such as they were, and those of Richard Nixon.
Previously critical of the former president’s “half-baked Rooseveltian socialism,” by the time of his death The Nation had swung to the left. We saw TR as “a voice crying in the wilderness,” who couldn’t make it to the promised land.
What would later become known as the Prague Spring began with the ascension, on this day in 1968, of the reformist Alexander Dubček to the post of first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
After World War I, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer led a campaign to arrest, imprison and deport thousands of supposedly subversive political radicals. Almost 1,000 people were netted in Detroit alone.
Andrew Johnson’s and Bill Clinton’s impeachment trials; obituaries for Theodore Roosevelt, Vladimir Lenin and Winston Churchill; the beginnings of the Prague Spring and the Arab Spring—and all of it before the end of January!