The Nation is a weekly U.S.magazine devoted to politics and culture, self-described as "the flagship of the left.Founded on July 6, 1865 at the start of Reconstruction as a supporter of the victorious North in the American Civil War, it is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the US.

Abolitionists founded The Nation in July 1865 on "Newspaper Row" in Manhattan, N.Y.. At the time, Joseph H. Richards was the publisher and E.L. Godkin, a classical liberal critic of nationalism, imperialism, and socialism, was the editor. The magazine would stay at Newspaper Row for the next ninety years. Wendell Phillips Garrison, son of William Lloyd Garrison, was literary editor of the periodical for 41 years beginning in 1865 to 1906.

Its Mission according to The Nation’s founding prospectus of 1865, "The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred."

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 which morphed into the "New York Post" and now a conservative tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch while The Nation became known for its left-liberal politics.

The Nation has bureaus in London, and Southern Africa and departments covering Architecture, Art, Corporations, Defense, Environment, Films, Legal Affairs, Music, Peace and Disarmament, Poetry, and the United Nations. The circulation of The Nation is rising and as of 2004 is more than double that of other political rags such as The New Republic, and larger than the neoconservative The Weekly Standard, and the conservative National Review.

Notable contributors over the years have included Albert Einstein, Franz Boas, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bertrand Russell, Barbara Garson, H. L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, Edward Said, Christopher Hitchens, Hunter S. Thompson, Langston Hughes, Ralph Nader, James Baldwin, Clement Greenberg, Tom Hayden, Daniel Singer, I.F. Stone, Leon Trotsky, Franklin D. Roosevelt, James K. Galbraith, John Steinbeck, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Beecher.