This is for all the history buffs out there: To honor the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, The Atlantic has released a special commerative issue, available today. There’s really no magazine more suited for this endeavor, since it began publishing before the war even started.

Inside the issue there is plenty to digest. President Barack Obama penned an introduction, and there are pieces from notable Atlantic contributors such as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“When The Atlantic originally published many of these pieces, the most-consequential questions the country has faced were wide open: Would the Union survive? Would slavery? What did it mean to be an American?” said the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, James Bennet. “And so The Atlantic’s writers not only bore witness but argued toward the answers. The result is a conversation about the American idea that, 150 years later, will strike readers as complex, provocative, and surprisingly resonant with our times.”