80 Days

There are many ways to shape time into meaningful compartments. Photographers talk about the decisive moment. Pop culture tends to think in decades–the Roaring Twenties, the Swinging Sixties. Some historians are satisfied by nothing less than what French thinkers call the longue duree, the centuries-long unfolding of social and even geological change.

In a faster-moving world, we find ourselves thinking about days and the way that a single one–think D-day, think 9/11–can have consequences that play out for decades. This month marks the 80th anniversary of the day in 1923 when TIME published its first issue. Our magazine began as a means to shed light on the course of events, so in keeping with that mission, we decided to mark our milestone with a fresh experiment in history. Let us suppose that George Santayana was right, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Then which are the days we should remember as if they were yesterday? Looking over the past eight decades, we debated, discussed and finally picked 80 days that changed the world.

Turning points come in many forms. There are the easy calls. The attack on Pearl Harbor, the fall of the Berlin Wall–these are moments that the world builds monuments to or that we do individually, in our hearts and minds. Then there are the ones whose importance we understand in retrospect. You didn’t mark it in your diary when benefits consultant Ted Benna devised the 401(k)? Neither did we. On the day in 1938 that oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia, the king was unimpressed because he had been hoping to find water. Then there are the days whose weight we still don’t know how to gauge. Over the long arc of history, what will be the full meaning of Sept. 11? Even now, as some of its consequences are being worked out before our very eyes, we possess just a part of the answer.

What we also realized about these red-letter days is that frequently we were telling the story of individual people, those who, to use Stephen Spender’s phrase, “left the vivid air signed with their honor.” (Or with their shame. History is not just a gallery of heroes.) Here’s Jesse Owens waving to Hitler after crushing the Fuhrer’s idea of Aryan superiority. Here’s Tim Berners-Lee posting a message to colleagues about his idea to create the World Wide Web. We wanted to picture them as they went about their business, on a day when it just so happened that their business was making history. –By Richard Lacayo