Richard Kreitner in The Nation:
Let’s be frank: It’s a somewhat presumptuous name for a magazine. Adopting it may have been akin to what philosophers refer to as a “speech act,” meant to call into being the very thing referred to. Largely absent from pre–Civil War political rhetoric, which more often spoke of “the union” or “the republic,” the word nation appeared five times in Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address. Two years later, when the first issue rolled off the presses in July 1865, the Confederacy had been defeated and Lincoln murdered, and a fierce fight over whether the “nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” would indeed see “a new birth of freedom” was just beginning. The Nation was founded to see that struggle through—and we will.
By the 1920s, there was still something a little incongruous in a magazine so named devoting hundreds of pages over three years to an extensive meditation on each of the separate states. Penned by some of the most illustrious writers of the period—W.E.B. Du Bois on Georgia, Edmund Wilson on New Jersey, Sherwood Anderson on Ohio, Willa Cather on Nebraska, H.L. Mencken on Maryland, Sinclair Lewis on Minnesota, Theodore Dreiser on Indiana—the essays in that series, “These United States,” explored the rich history, geography, and character of those minor subdivisions supposedly effaced by the Civil War. The country was often depicted as “one vast and almost uniform republic,” the editors observed in an introductory note in 1922. But that left out what made American life interesting: “What riches of variety remain among its federated commonwealths? What distinctive colors of life among its many sections and climates and altitudes?”
In perusing the following dispatches from “These Dis-United States,” as we’re calling the series this time around, you may well be struck by how similar the experiences of this moment are in many states across this bruised and battered land.
More here.
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