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N0KFQ > TODAY 23.11.14 16:30l 64 Lines 2947 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Nov 23
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Sent: 141123/1530Z 40677@N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA BPQ1.4.61
Nov 23, 1936:
First issue of Life is published
On November 23, 1936, the first issue of the pictorial magazine
Life is published, featuring a cover photo of the Fort Peck Dam
by Margaret Bourke-White.
Life actually had its start earlier in the 20th century as a
different kind of magazine: a weekly humor publication, not
unlike today's The New Yorker in its use of tart cartoons,
humorous pieces and cultural reporting. When the original Life
folded during the Great Depression, the influential American
publisher Henry Luce bought the name and re-launched the magazine
as a picture-based periodical on this day in 1936. By this time,
Luce had already enjoyed great success as the publisher of Time,
a weekly news magazine.
From his high school days, Luce was a newsman, serving with his
friend Briton Hadden as managing editors of their school
newspaper. This partnership continued through their college years
at Yale University, where they acted as chairmen and managing
editors of the Yale Daily News, as well as after college, when
Luce joined Hadden at The Baltimore News in 1921. It was during
this time that Luce and Hadden came up with the idea for Time.
When it launched in 1923, it was with the intention of delivering
the world's news through the eyes of the people who made it.
Whereas the original mission of Time was to tell the news, the
mission of Life was to show it. In the words of Luce himself, the
magazine was meant to provide a way for the American people "to
see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events ... to see
things thousands of miles away... to see and be amazed; to see
and be instructed... to see, and to show..." Luce set the tone of
the magazine with Margaret Bourke-White's stunning cover
photograph of the Fort Peck Dam, which has since become an icon
of the 1930s and the great public works completed under President
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
Life was an overwhelming success in its first year of
publication. Almost overnight, it changed the way people looked
at the world by changing the way people could look at the world.
Its flourish of images painted vivid pictures in the public mind,
capturing the personal and the public, and putting it on display
for the world to take in. At its peak, Life had a circulation of
over 8 million and it exerted considerable influence on American
life in the beginning and middle of the 20th century.
With picture-heavy content as the driving force behind its
popularity,the magazine suffered as television became society's
predominant means of communication. Life ceased running as a
weekly publication in 1972, when it began losing audience and
advertising dollars to television. In 2004, however, it resumed
weekly publication as a supplement to U.S. newspapers. At its
re-launch, its combined circulation was once again in the
millions.
73, K.O. n0kfq
N0KFQ @ N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
E-mail: kohiggs@gmail.com
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