About This Issue

Celebrating TIME'S 60th anniversary, this special issue undertakes to recall the most amazing six decades in history in the words we used to report them. It is not, however, a chronological anthology. Instead we classified the news into six broad categories, including War, Economics, Culture and Science. We then picked five major events in each of these categories, so that this issue offers highlights from 30 of the past 60 years. For each of those 30 years, we condensed TIME'S original account of a single major event to one page and devoted the facing page to a selection of other happenings of that year. Though we compressed a great deal, we did not rewrite or revise the stories. Old-fashioned spellings and usages like Negro were not altered. Each picture too was chosen from those that appeared in TIME during that same year. And in headlines, type faces and graphic design, we followed as closely as possible the styles that TIME used at various periods in its past.

In charge of this ambitious project--at 86 editorial pages, it is the biggest in the magazine's history--was Senior Writer Otto Friedrich. The author of several historical books, the most recent of which was The End of the World, Friedrich was also responsible for the issue of TIME that celebrated America's 1976 Bicentennial. The issue featured Thomas Jefferson on the cover and retold the events of the fateful week of July 4, 1776. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.