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.
taken from:
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-issue-of-life-is-published [23.11.2012]
Stroud was first sent to prison in 1909 after he killed a bartender
in a brawl. He had nearly completed his sentence at Leavenworth Federal
Prison in Kansas when
he stabbed a guard to death in 1916. Though he claimed to have acted in
self-defense, he was convicted and sentenced to hang. A handwritten
plea by Stroud's mother to President Woodrow Wilson earned Stroud a commuted sentence of life in permanent solitary confinement.
In 1943, Stroud's Digest of the Diseases of Birds, a 500-page
text that included his own illustrations, was published to general
acclaim. In spite of his success, Stroud was depressed over the
isolation he felt at Alcatraz, and he attempted suicide several times.
The legendary "Birdman of Alcatraz" died in a Missouri prison in 1963 at the age of 73.
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