Last week at a luncheon in New York's Hotel Pierre, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the American Society of Magazine Editors held the eleventh annual National Magazine Award presentation. A Special Award in the Field of Public Service was presented to TIME for last year's Bicentennial issue, "Independence!," the most popular issue in the magazine's 53-year history. Four days earlier, TIME had won the national Headliners Award for this same July 4, 1776, issue. Both honors came as Senior Editor Otto Friedrich, who edited our first Bicentennial special, was plunging into the closing stage of preparation for the mid-May publication of our second special, "The New Nation," dated Sept. 26, 1789. This sequel, like its prizewinning predecessor, was written as if TIME reporters were on the scene that week two centuries ago. It was a turbulent, fascinating, great week. While the tide of revolution ran high in Paris, Congress wrote history in New York City by passing the Bill of Rights and the Judiciary Act, creating the Supreme Court. President Washington finished naming his Cabinet, which included Thomas Jefferson of Virginia as Secretary of State and Colonel Alexander Hamilton of New York as Secretary of the Treasury. It was also a time when word arrived of a mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty, when the first chrysanthemum reached France from China, when Captain John Paul Jones was accused (falsely) of an attempted rape of a ten-year-old girl in Russia, and when Traitor Benedict Arnold was floundering in his attempt to run an import-export business in Canada. Our cover subject for the week? The inevitable, overwhelming choice: George Washington, who gave the new Republic the highest gift in his power, character.

"Nothing quite like the 1776 issue had ever been tried," says Friedrich. "But I think the sequel is going to be just as interesting, maybe even more so." To prepare for "The New Nation," 18 researchers last November began tapping TIME'S own library but soon branched out for primary source materials to the Rare Book Room of the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the Boston Athenaeum and numerous other collections.

All of this rummaging through the past turned up some engaging anecdotes. Naturalist Thomas Jefferson, for example, had reached the end of his wits in a debate with that skeptical Frenchman Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who did not believe that such a thing as a moose existed. To prove the point, Jefferson, a pragmatic scientist, had a full-grown American moose shipped from New Hampshire to Buffon with his compliments--unique evidence, from the new nation, of a new world.

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