Life 2000-2009: The Decade That Changed The World (Hb)

We measure our history in terms of eras and epochs, loaning a personality to certain periods such as, the Industrial Age, the Roaring '20s, the American Century and so on. What to make, then, of the past 10 years, a time of extraordinary events and seismic shifts? The first decade of the new millennium will clearly stand in the American mmind-set alongside the war years of the 1940s and the social turmoil of the 1960s as a time of critical significance to the United States and, indeed, the global community. Do we call it the Tumultuous Decade? The Years of Upheaval?
The Decade That Changed the World? It certainly was that. From the begining, with the contested presidential election of 2000, America was looking hard at itself and the road ahead. How badly divided are we? Where are we headed? Then came the horrific events of September 11, 2011, and nothing would be quite same thereafter. Not since Pearl Harbor had we been attacked on our own soil, and 9/11 put us on a wartime footing again. We engaged Osama bin Laden's allies in Afghanistan and then followed that with the attack on Saddam Hussein's despotic regime in Iraq, and the U.S. remains active in both theaters today.
Natural cataclysms that were continuously shaking the planet paraded forth: the tsunami, Kartina, the Chinese earthquake. Unprecedented events took place, as the pope visited Jerusalem and the American electorate chose a black President. Illusions were shattered. For a time, it seemed we were experiencing a period of unprecedented affluence, the quite suddenly we were in the midst of the most dire economic slump since the Great Depression. Boardroom scoundrels were prosecuted and locked up.
When we could afford to, we smile: at the antics of the "High School Musical" kids; at the adventures of "Harry Potter"; at the marvelous talents of "Tiger Woods", "Sarah Hughes", "Roger Federer" and "Michael Phelps". We fondly recalled titans who had left us: "Ronald Reagan", "George Harrison", "Julia Child" and on through, in the year now ending, "Walter Cronkite", "Ted Kennedy" and, tragically young, "Michael Jackson".
In the pages of this special commemorative book, "Life's" editors revisit, in words and extraordinary pictures, a time like no others. We march again through "the Decade That Changed the World".