The biggest news, an event that really was momentous, was of a sort that seemed barely discernible as an event. That is because it actually was a concatenation of trillions of events–all the choices and exertions by billions of people around the world, but most remarkably in America, that drove the current process of rapid and sustained wealth-creation, for which there simply is no historical precedent. This Republic, born of religious impulses and disciplines that proved conducive to commerce (thrift, industriousness, deferral of gratifications), was, in the eighth year of the century’s 10th decade, pleased by its productivity but queasy about the continued coarsening of its culture. And some Americans were uneasy about the possibility that America’s first great scold had been prescient: ““Religion brought forth Prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother . . . There is danger lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness.’’ Thus spoke Cotton Mather.

So prodigiously did economic growth generate revenues for the government, the political class could hardly avoid balancing the budget. But it did avoid it. While preening about producing–well, promising, for the year 2002–the first balanced budget since 1969, the political class proved itself more united by class interests than divided by ideology: it generated a geyser of domestic spending increases that prevented the economy from balancing the budget right now. Republicans ran a Congress that increased appropriations for all the cabinet-level departments that Republicans so recently were promising to abolish, and for the Legal Services Corporation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and . . . And so ended the noisy pretense of Infantile Republicanism, the idea that there was afoot a challenge to the post-New Deal, or at least the post-Great Society configuration of the central government.

Seventy people fled the country or took the Fifth Amendment to avoid talking about the president’s innovative campaign finance practices, which he said were beyond reproach and proof that reforms are urgently needed. Reformers said there is ““too much’’ money in politics. Ted Turner promised $1 billion to the United Nations. The movie ““Titanic’’ cost more ($200 million) than the president’s 1996 campaign. Edith Haisman, the oldest survivor of the Titanic, died at 100. So did Frank Shomo, 108, the last survivor of the Johnstown flood of May 31, 1889, when he was 100 days old.

The world was made safe from land mines and chemical weapons–it says so, on pieces of paper. Perhaps Saddam Hussein, who demonstrated that U.N. inspectors are in Iraq at his sufferance, has not read those pieces of paper.

In Iowa a fertility specialist counted to seven and declared that the treatment of Mrs. McCaughey had achieved an unexpected degree of ““success.’’ In Boca Raton, Fla., an umpire asked if the 12-year-old catcher was wearing a protective cup. ““I’m a girl,’’ said Melissa Raglin. That’s no excuse. Rules are rules, said some baseball bureaucrats. The president of the local chapter of the National Organization for Women sniffed ““harassment.’’ A friend of Timothy McVeigh’s testified, ““If you don’t consider what happened in Oklahoma City, Tim is a good person.''

A gadget named Sojourner gave the world a close-up glimpse of Mars–in the nick of time, given that evidence from the Hubble telescope suggested that a galaxy racing toward our galaxy at 300,000 miles an hour may produce an obliterating collision in just 5 billion years. Thirty-nine adherents of Heaven’s Gate decided not to wait. A sheep named Dolly was a marvel. So was a golfer named Tiger.

Alberta Martin, 90, the last living widow of a Confederate veteran, was 21 when she married her husband, who was then 81 and promptly fathered a child. Daisy Anderson, one of two known surviving widows of Union veterans, was 21 when she married an ex-slave, then 79, who had enlisted after the Emancipation Proclamation. Alberta and Daisy met this year at Gettysburg, at the burial of a casualty from July 1-3, 1863–no one knows from which side–whose remains were found last year, protruding from the hallowed ground.

Time’s scythe took from us perhaps the best ballplayer never to play in the major leagues–the first baseman for the Homestead Grays, Buck Leonard, who was known as ““the black Lou Gehrig’’ because a racially blinkered nation did not yet know how to think of Gehrig as the white Buck Leonard. For connoisseurs of sinewy prose and savory journalism, no death diminished the public stock of pleasure more than that of columnist Murray Kempton, who crafted sentences like this (concerning an Eisenhower campaign stop in 1956):

““In Miami, he had walked carefully by the harsher realities, speaking some twenty feet from an airport drinking fountain labeled “Colored’ and saying that the condition it represented was more amenable to solution by the hearts of men than by laws, and complimenting Florida as “typical today of what is best in America,’ a verdict which might seem to some contingent on finding out what happened to the Negro snatched from the Wildwood jail Sunday.''

In 1997 America was in many ways a much better place than it was when that sentence was written, but it did not have any better craftsman than Kempton.