Images of the past: The Epic of Man 1

I became interested in history almost as I became interested in anything. It's hard to point to anything in my early childhood that led to this interest, and it is not shared by anyone else in the family. Or among most of my friends, for that matter.

One early fascination was one of those big books from Time Publishing (later Time Life): The Epic of Man. It was a compilation of articles that appeared in LIFE magazine between 1955 and 1957. Back then, big middelbrow national magazines had a st...