A few weeks before going to press, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas got some great news: We’ve been nominated for an Utne Independent Press Award for Best New Publication. Though our competition is stiff—including Meatpaper, a magazine about, well, meat—we hope you’ll cross your fingers when the winners are announced in January. We sure will!

Why did we get nominated? Just take a look at our latest issue, which you just received. Our lead article, by Wilson Center fellow Matthew Dallek, explores the history of homeland security in the United States and discovers a progressive alternative to the Bush Administration’s weak and overpoliticized approach. In fact, history runs as a theme throughout the issue. Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson disassemble the “Vietnam analogy” that, war supporters claim, tells us to stay in Iraq—on the contrary, they find, if anything Vietnam tells us we should leave now. Jim Sleeper, aPulitzer Prize-winning journalist, examines the life of teachers’ union leader Albert Shanker, while Brandeis professor Peniel Joseph unpacks the complex relationship between the civil rights movement and American democracy. And be sure to check out journalist Rick Perlstein’s essay on the 1972 George McGovern campaign and what it can, and cannot, teach liberals today.