It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper that closed in 1865, after ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

It has news bureaus in Washington, D.C., London, and South Africa, with departments covering architecture, art, corporations, defense, environment, films, legal affairs, music, peace and disarmament, poetry, and the United Nations.

Its founding publisher was Joseph H. Richards; the editor was Godkin, an immigrant from Ireland who had formerly worked as a correspondent of the London Daily News and The New York Times.

"[11] In the first year of publication, one of the magazine's regular features was The South as It Is,[12] dispatches from a tour of the war-torn region by John Richard Dennett, a recent Harvard graduate and a veteran of the Port Royal Experiment.

Dennett interviewed Confederate veterans, freed slaves, agents of the Freedmen's Bureau, and ordinary people he met by the side of the road.

Among the causes supported by the publication in its earliest days was civil service reform—moving the basis of government employment from a political patronage system to a professional bureaucracy based upon meritocracy.

[13] Closely related to this was the publication's advocacy of the elimination of protective tariffs in favor of lower prices of consumer goods associated with a free trade system.

In 1881, newspaperman-turned-railroad-baron Henry Villard acquired The Nation and converted it into a weekly literary supplement for his daily newspaper the New York Evening Post.

As the 1932 U.S. presidential election approached, the Nation saw no real choice between Hoover and Roosevelt, and it urged readers to vote for Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas.

However, the issue was found moot in Nation Magazine v. United States Department of Defense, because the war ended before the case was heard.

In 2015, The Nation celebrated its 150th anniversary with a documentary film by Academy Award–winning director Barbara Kopple; a 268-page special issue[31] featuring pieces of art and writing from the archives, and new essays by frequent contributors like Eric Foner, Noam Chomsky, E. L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Rebecca Solnit, and Vivian Gornick; a book-length history of the magazine by D. D. Guttenplan (which The Times Literary Supplement called "an affectionate and celebratory affair"); events across the country; and a relaunched website.

It's more than a magazine—it's a crucible of ideas forged in the time of Emancipation, tempered through depression and war and the civil-rights movement, and honed as sharp and relevant as ever in an age of breathtaking technological and economic change.

Through it all, The Nation has exhibited that great American tradition of expanding our moral imaginations, stoking vigorous dissent, and simply taking the time to think through our country's challenges anew.

In their reasoning, the editors of The Nation professed: "As we find ourselves on a hinge of history—a generation summoned to the task of redeeming our democracy and restoring our republic—no one ever has to wonder what Bernie Sanders stands for.

[35] On September 23, 2024, The Nation endorsed Kamala Harris for the 2024 United States presidential election but with criticism on foreign politics, especially in regard to the Gaza war.

[37] Following Donald Trump's victory in the election, The Nation ran an opinion piece attributing the result to widespread support for "anti-system politics" among American society, drawing parallels between Harris' campaign and that of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Adding sales from newsstands, The Nation had a total circulation of 96,000 copies per issue in 2021, earning the majority of its revenue from subscriptions and donations, rather than print advertising.

The Nation's two poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, issued an apology for publishing the poem, the first such action ever taken by the magazine.

[42] Grace Schulman, The Nation's poetry editor from 1971 to 2006, wrote that the apology represented a disturbing departure from the magazine's traditionally broad conception of artistic freedom.