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Life (magazine)

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Life Magazine Cover, August 25th 1967, featuring a U.S. Marine and an Injured Child in Vietnam.

Life Goes to Vietnam

Debunking claims that news media fueled public disillusionment and cost the US victory.
by Gregory A. Daddis via Process: A Blog for American History on March 29, 2023
African Americans sitting on their front porch looking at a National Guardsman holding a rifle.

A Haunting Portrait of Newark’s Bloody Summer of Unrest

The photojournalist Bud Lee captured the riots of 1967 and the human cost of the brutal police crackdown.
by M. Z. Adnan via The New Yorker on July 29, 2023
Gordon Park's photograph of law enforcement officers kicking in a door

When Crime Photography Started to See Color

Six decades ago, Gordon Parks, Life magazine’s first black photographer, revolutionized what a crime photo could look like.
by Bill Shapiro via The Atlantic on June 16, 2020
“Big Elliott” Wright at the Big Apple Night Club.

Set the Country to Stamping

The origins of the Big Apple dance.
by Robert Greene II via Oxford American on November 19, 2019

We Have Always Loved Ranking Things, Particularly American Presidents

Douglas Brinkley offers a brief history of political listicles.
by Douglas Brinkley via Literary Hub on May 8, 2019
Timor residents in traditional dress look at a National Geographic photographer demonstrating his camera.

National Geographic Has Always Depended on Exoticism

With its race issue, the magazine is trying a different direction. Can it escape its past?
by Rebecca Onion, John Edwin Mason via Slate on March 14, 2018
A frame from Zapruder's film.

The Other Shooter: The Saddest and Most Expensive 26 Seconds of Amateur Film Ever Made

For many of us, especially those who weren’t alive when it happened, we’re all watching that event through Zapruder’s lens.
by Alex Pasternack via Vice on November 12, 2012
A turntable and records.

What’s Old is New Again (and Again): On the Cyclical Nature of Nostalgia

Retro was not the antithesis to the sub- and countercultural experiments of the 1960s, it grew directly out of them.
by Tobias Becker via Literary Hub on December 13, 2023
Collage of two photos of Marilyn Monroe.

Who Was the Real Marilyn Monroe?

"Blonde," a heavily fictionalized film by Andrew Dominik, explores the star's life and legend in a narrative that's equal parts glamorous and disturbing.
by Grant Wong via Smithsonian on September 26, 2022
Shoppers and security guards in a mall.
partner

The Retail Theft ‘Crisis’ Isn’t What You Think It Is

The recent panic over retail theft reveals tensions at the heart of American consumerism.
by Sean H. Vanatta via Made by History on December 15, 2021
FDNY firefighters in WTC wreckage

What Gilles Peress Saw on 9/11

The Magnum photographer looks back on capturing an “inconceivable event.”
by Margaret Talbot via The New Yorker on September 9, 2021
Collage with a woman pointing to a midcentury modern chair

Instagram’s Favorite Furniture Style Has an Uncomfortable History

How we sit isn’t the only thing midcentury modernism sought to control.
by Rebecca Onion, Kristina Wilson via Slate on April 30, 2021
A white woman lounging on a "marshmallow sofa"

Mid-Century Modernism’s Racial History

What do we know about the history of these designs? Who was buying this furniture when modernism was new, and why?
by Kristina Wilson via Hyperallergic on April 26, 2021
profile illustration of human nervous system against black background

The Mystery of ‘Harriet Cole’

Whose body was harvested to create a spectacular anatomical specimen, and did that person know they would be on display more than a century later?
by Jessica Leigh Hester via Atlas Obscura on March 18, 2021
Photograph of a newsstand selling magazines

What Are Magazines Good For?

The story of America can be told through the story of its periodicals.
by Nathan Heller via The New Yorker on February 16, 2021
People standing on the sidewalk and walking by Rick Allmen’s Café Bizarre on Third Street, November 11, 1959. Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images.

Wanna-Beats: In 1959, Café Bizarre Gave Straights an Entree Into Beatnik Culture

“At the remove of time, it’s really hard to tell the difference between beat and beatsploitation.”
by Ben Marks via Collectors Weekly on January 2, 2020

The Lost World of Weegee

Depression-era Americans viewed urban life in America through the lens of Weegee’s camera.
by Terry Teachout via Commentary on August 1, 2018
Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver collaborating on an art project

“God Help American Science”: Engineering Theatre and Spectacle

When an event promises you will "hear the body broadcast its sounds," "see without light," and "see dancers float on air,” there’s bound to be disappointment.
by W. Patrick McCray via Patrick McCray on September 7, 2016

The Struggle in Black and White: Activist Photographers Who Fought for Civil Rights

None of these iconic photographs would exist without the brave photographers documenting the civil rights movement.
by Hunter Oatman-Stanford via Collectors Weekly on October 7, 2014
Typewriter with keys that have the letters "IA" on each of them.

How Iowa Flattened Literature

With help from the CIA, Paul Engle’s writing students battled Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing still lingers.
by Eric Bennett via The Chronicle of Higher Education on February 10, 2014

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