TIME'S ANNUAL MAKING OF AMERICA SERIES
celebrates history by offering provocative insights into the lives of those who shaped the American experience. Some highlights:
This issue is an attempt to reconstruct, with the tools of both history and journalism, and in our distinctive newsmagazine format, at least part of the life and soul of the events that gave birth to our nation.
From About this Issue
Jul. 4, 1976
Although independence had been months, even years, in coming, the week's events seemed startling in their sudden finality. July 2 declared the fact of separation. In another two days, on July 4, the Congress endorsed an extraordinary document, a Declaration that stated the Colonies' numerous reasons for leaving the imperial embrace.
From The Birth of a New America
Jul. 4, 1976
By the time President Jefferson sent the captains up that muddy river and out of sight, the young nation already had a Constitution, but it lacked an epic. It had a government but no real identity. Lewis and Clark helped invent one.
From Lewis and Clark
By Walter Kirn
Jul. 8, 2002
Photos and Graphics
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us. George Washington's colleagues found it hard to imagine touching the austere general on the shoulder, and we would find it even more so today. Jefferson and Adams are just as intimidating. But Ben Franklin, that genial urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than of marble, addressable by nickname, and he turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind those newfangled spectacles.
From Citizen Ben's 7 Great Virtues
By Walter Isaacson
Jul. 7, 2003
Photos and Graphics
On the bicentennial of his re-election as President, Jefferson still intrigues Americans for another reason: his tantalizing inner complexity. The tall, soft-spoken Virginia squire who loved fine wines and whose enormous book collection became the core of the Library of Congress was no unfeeling, detached egghead but a passionate, somewhat elusive human being.
From Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Thomas Jefferson
By Walter Kirn
Jul. 5, 2004
Photos and Graphics
From the start, his memory was molded to serve a purpose. When telegraph wires clicked with the news that Lincoln had been shot at Ford's Theatre, the nation was facing the monumental and confounding task of restoring peace after four years of broiling war.
From The True Lincoln
By Joshua Wolf Shenk
Jul. 4, 2005
Photos and Graphics
Teddy stays with us because he seems so much like one of us. Although he was born in 1858, it's the 20th century he decidedly belongs to, the century he brought America into on his terms.
From The 20th Century Express
By Richard Lacayo
Jul. 3, 2006
More stories about Teddy Roosevelt
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