A Letter From the Publisher

Dear Time-Reader

For longer than most of you have been reading TIME, Colonel James Howard Bishop has used our magazine to help his classes at Culver Military Academy toward a better understanding of history.

For 14 years, Colonel Bishop has distributed copies of TIME on Friday morning to upperclassmen in his American and world history courses. He asks them to devote one hour of their two-hour Sunday-night study period to reading the front of the magazine--Letters through People. Monday morning, he conducts a quiz session with a light-handed touch which sounds almost like a table-top quarterback reviewing Saturday's football game.

"How's the world gone this summer?" he asked a group of blue-uniformed cadets who filed into their first fall class.

Cadet James Reid Brazell, 17, said, "Thanks to TIME, I won all the arguments I got into." Others said: "TIME certainly did a job on bureaucracy. That story about slippery floors in the Pentagon was a lulu." "Congress didn't get anything important done--a do-nothing Congress." "That Red youth rally in Berlin--those people were really hopped up."

Starting his 30th year as a history instructor, Colonel Bishop,* at 58, is wise enough to know that one well-communicated idea can stimulate more thinking than an hour packed with cotton-wool fact. To that end, he asks his cadets to find parallel situations between current world affairs and what they have learned in history studies.

"It isn't current events classes we run during the school year," he says. "It's definitely history, but history in the light of today's problems . . . TIME has a balance in its coverage of what's going on in the world. The boys, often before we do, find interpretations that link up current events with the week's history lessons and give added meaning to both."

Colonel Bishop likes his history translated into living beings and moving forces, an objective TIME has always had. His attitude is accepted readily by his students, one of whom remarked about the recent map of Russian slave labor camps: "There's nothing especially new about that for the Russians, is there? Couldn't the map have stood for the banishment camps and Siberian prisons the Czars kept for the disposal of their political opponents? The Bolshies are doing what Russians in power have been doing for generations."

TIME'S presence in Colonel Bishop's classroom is notable, but not unique. As many as 64.000 copies of TIME go to more than 1,800 high schools, junior colleges and colleges weekly. Some use TIME as part of classroom assignments. In addition, many more students order their own copies. Bulk subscriptions make possible reduced rates.

The TIME Educational Bureau also sends to schools maps which spotlight important happenings, weekly discussion outlines, monthly news questions and a semiannual news quiz.

Teachers tell us competition is spirited for the prizes of books and globes.

Another example of how TIME reports not merely current history but also the current of history was the recent, experimental television show, Your Stake in Japan.

One viewer who recognized in it this flow of great events was Alex D'Amato, a free-lance commercial artist who came to New York from Italy in 1930. He wrote: "I was part of the Occupation Army in Japan for a year. Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto were all part of my past life--and your program brought it all back ... I got into many arguments overseas, with other G.I.s who wanted to see Japan totally wiped out. I did not believe it then, and I'm glad that I do not believe it now. Revenge brings only revenge . . . Thanks for your provocative program."

Many others of the 19,000 who wrote to ask for copies of the map we offered said they were impressed with the program's dramatization of history.

Cordially yours,

*The same James H. Bishop known to U.S. tennis fans as the father of the Junior Davis Cup competitions, 17-year executive committee member of the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association and chairman of the Junior Davis Cup and Davis Cup selection committees.

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