At 6 o 'clock last Tuesday morning in Philadelphia, Virginia delegate Thomas Jefferson looked out at the gray sky and then noted that his thermometer registered 70DEG. Soon afterward, there came a bolt of lightning and a sudden deluge. By 9 o'clock, the city was awash. Nearly 50 delegates to the Second Continental Congress slowly filled the meeting room of the State House on Walnut Street... The room steamed. The only consolation in keeping the windows closed against rain was that they also excluded the horseflies from a nearby stable...

So begins the cover story on Thomas Jefferson in the most unusual issue that TIME has ever published. It is our Bicentennial issue dated July 4, 1776, and devoted to reporting the birth of a new nation just as if TIME reporters had been there. After almost a year of exhaustive work, the 1776 issue is going to newsstands and subscribers this week -- the first time in our history that two different issues have appeared simultaneously. Under the supervision of Senior Editor Otto Friedrich, a staff of 14 researchers headed by Nancy Williams culled mountains of memoirs, letters and contemporary news papers to amass some 1,600 pages of files, about 50% more than the amount sent by our correspondents for a regular issue of TIME. The design work for the issue, including illustrations drawn largely from historical ar chives, was done by Assis tant Art Director Wade Hancock.

Numerous writers used the amassed research to describe not only the politics of independence in Philadelphia and General Washington's preparations to defend New York, but also a series of strangely familiar stories. Inflation was ravaging the Colonies (beef was up 114% in three months), and in distant Viet Nam, a civil war was raging (rebels captured the settlement of Ta Ngon, or Saigon, in the spring of 1776). The research also unearthed some fascinating minutiae: there was only one working toilet in the Colonies -- property of a former Royal Governor of Maryland; the na scent sport of golf was played with feather-stuffed leather balls; Boston stores had just begun selling a new gadget called the umbrella.

For the whole Bicentennial staff, which celebrated the completion of the project by drinking toasts and eating roast beef at New York City's pre-Revolutionary Fraunces Tavern, this issue has been partly an exercise in historical imagination and partly an inspiration. As an introduction to the special issue puts it, "At a time when Americans are questioning the very meaning of their nation's basic beliefs, it is refreshing and reassuring to return to our origins, to our fundamental values, and to try to illuminate how earlier Americans saw the world and their place in it."

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