Until recently, the historical process was entirely time-bound. Accounts were produced after the fact. News was something that happened. A documentary depicted the past. We read about, rather than witnessed, history. Now, after a long, slow buildup, history-making has become time-unbound. When the power to act on the world scene merges with the power to direct the show about it, instant history-making becomes possible. Participation, witness, and confirmation hitherto limited to those on the scene can now be globally experienced while the event is still going on .. Instant history is made when control of video-satellite-computer technologies makes it possible to blanket the world in real time with selected images, provoke reactions that feed back into the event, speed its resolution, and quick-freeze the outcome into received history. Instant history is image history in a supportive context. The sense of there skirts reasoning and preempts alternatives. Instant history is the simultaneous, global, mass, living, showing, telling, and making history in brief and intensive bursts. Past, present, and future can now be packaged, witnessed, and frozen in a flash into memorable moving imagery. ' Films of Vietnam took hours or days to reach us, after the fact: It may have been the first living room but not for the first few years and not in real time. Starting with the make-believe incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, it was a long, slow, duplicitous buildup. It lasted 11 years, destroyed three countries, and left behind some 2 million dead and a legacy of hardship, including economic sanctions, for the living. Body counts were in the headlines but did not have public witness. The tide of public reaction turned after victory eluded policymakers and cameras began to record unsettling images: the Tet offensive, a summary execution of an enemy suspect, naked enemy children fleeing napalm, thatched enemy huts being put to the torch. When cameras turn to focus on the fallen, the war is lost or soon will be. This is why the press was barred from Dover Air Force Base where Gulf War body bags landed. It took a freelance reporter posing as a mortician to get an estimate of the casualties. The Iraq-Iran war, totally out of sight, dragged on for 10 years, claimed more than a million casualties, and ended in exhaustion. The declaration of emergency by Poland's Jaruzelski took 8 years to unravel, and the majority of Poles responding to a survey in 1991 still thought it had been necessary. (New York Times, May 20, 1992, p. 1). However, when chaotic perestroika, made visi-