Memories from Right Now

• Share

Remember the great champagne shortage of 1999? As we roared into the biggest New Year's Eve celebration ever, fear spread about the stockpile of French (most Americans liked France then) bubbly. The world wondered whether it would be left high and dry at the dawn of the millennium. And dark. The Y2K bug was supposed to fry the embedded chips in electronic devices ranging from toasters to mainframes. Defending its honor, Paris threw a spectacular millennium party on Dec. 31, 1999, bubbles and all, and the day of Y2K came and went with nary a ripple of disaster.

Entering this new age, we were anticipating the wrong problems--and the dates of significance were not the ones we thought they would be. Turns of the century are like that. Looking back at the turn of the 21st, we can begin to see how history will view our millennial era's real turning points, several of which TIME will profile next week in a special report, "80 Days That Changed the World." The issue will mark TIME's 80th anniversary by surveying the past eight decades and choosing the events that had the most lasting impact.

While the years of World War II and the turbulent 1960s offer an abundance of eventful dates to revisit, the turn of the 21st century gives us plenty of candidates too. The run-up to the millennium was characterized by one of the frothiest stock-market surges of all time, kicked off on Aug. 9, 1995, when the initial public offering (IPO) of stock in the Internet-browser maker Netscape rocketed from an expected initial price of $12 to an opening trade of $71. Hundreds of IPOs later, on March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ index hit the all-time high of 5132.52, from which it would fall 62% in just two years.

Around the globe--in South America, Africa, Russia and other parts of Asia--the benefits of a world-market economy, globalization, were also coming under pressure. This unease rocked Seattle when, starting on Nov. 29, 1999, antiglobalist protesters ran amuck at a World Trade Organization meeting. Demonstrators indiscriminately trashed icons of capitalism, from McDonald's to the Gap, and the message got across: globalism doesn't float all boats.

The democratic process was tested too. History's clock stopped on Nov. 7, 2000, when George W. Bush and Al Gore failed to conclude the presidential election in a timely fashion, with the contested votes of a few thousand Floridians standing between the two. On Dec. 12, 2000, Bush, loser of the popular vote, won the presidency on electoral votes by fiat of the Supreme Court in the most controversial election in the history of the union.

The new President came into office promising to focus on a domestic agenda, but on Sept. 11, 2001, America's orientation in the world changed abruptly when al-Qaeda terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 people. America the righteous victim suddenly became the vindicator on Oct. 7, 2001, when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to drive out the ruling Taliban and the al-Qaeda forces it harbored. But an even more portentous development was unsheathed on Jan. 29, 2002, when President Bush broadened his doctrine with a speech identifying America's enemies as an "axis of evil" composed of North Korea, Iran and Iraq.