From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Fresh out of the University of Pennsylvania, a 22-year-old from Illinois named Donald Morrison landed a job at TIME in New York City and was searching for an apartment on the Upper West Side. This otherwise ordinary venture happened to occur in the extraordinary year of 1968. And so Morrison, looking for a Columbia University student willing to share his digs, found himself instead stranded inside Hamilton Hall just as campus activists took over the building. To escape, Morrison recalls, "I dived out a bathroom window in the back."

Twenty years later, we tapped Morrison for the job of bringing that tragic, pulsating, mythical year into perspective for our first TIME pictorial collector's edition, 1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation. A true child of the '60s, Morrison, now special projects editor, had even planned to spend his honeymoon at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, until his bride-to-be put her foot down. In 1968, he says, "we tried to capture something of the year's amazing, compelling electricity."

On your newsstand and at other outlets through March for $3.95,* 1968 recaptures familiar and forgotten images

in an indelible 112-page eyewitness to history. "A lot went past me at the time," recalls picture editor Suzanne Richie, who was 24 years old and living in Minnesota in 1968. But poring over 4,000 photos to make her final selections of 150 images, she felt "a shock of recognition and then the realization -- my God, all this happened in 1968?" Like her, you will rediscover the astonishing roller coaster of events, from the tragic (Robert Kennedy's vacant stare from the floor of the Los Angeles hotel pantry) to the trivial (a miniskirt dotted with peace symbols).

Incredibly, to those of us who lived through that tumultuous year, today's 20-year-olds study the events of 1968 in their history classes. Art director Christine Castigliano was only nine years old the first time around. But for her the complex year is captured dramatically by the special edition's cover image: two daisies and a bullet. The stark contrast "showed how jarring a time it was," she says. "I wanted to symbolize the energy and the explosiveness."

FOOTNOTE: *1968 is also available by mail. Send a check for $3.95, plus $1.50 for shipping and handling, to Time 1968, P.O. Box 30622, Tampa, Fla. 33630-0622.