The United States had backed Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s long war with Iran, but by the time the war ended in 1988 Iraq was deeply in debt—not least to neighboring Kuwait. In The Nation, Andy Kopkind warned of the consequences of “the wider war.”

A long and bitter conflict between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin over who would succeed Vladimir Lenin as the Soviet leader culminated on this day in 1928 when Stalin exiled Trotsky to Siberia.

The first UN delegates could bring “any amount and type of baggage they desire,” with one exception.

The Aswan Dam was a crucial construction project for Egypt after the 1952 revolution. President Gamal Abdel Nasser was looking to elevate Egypt as the leader of a pan-Arab unity movement.

The Nation has had many Nobel Prize winners contribute to our pages over the years. But we have had only one staff member who went on to win the Prize.

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.

Watch the remarks of Katrina vanden Heuvel, Stephen F. Cohen, Calvin Trillin, Greg Grandin, Juan Cole and Sara Alpern at the first event marking The Nation’s 150th anniversary.

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.