TODAY IN HISTORY

 

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's spillway 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 spillway, 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. Between 2004-2007, however, it resumed weekly publication as a supplement to U.S. newspapers. Today much of its archive is viewable online. 

GREAT BRITAIN

1499

Flemish imposter executed in London

Perkin Warbeck, who invaded England in 1497 claiming to be the lost son of King Edward IV, is hanged for allegedly trying to escape from the Tower of London. Believed to be a native of Tournai in Belgium, Warbeck went to Ireland in 1491 and claimed he was Richard, duke of York.

CRIME

1979

IRA member sentenced for Mountbatten’s assassination

Thomas McMahon, a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), is sentenced to life imprisonment for preparing and planting the bomb that killed Lord Louis Mountbatten and three others three months before. On August 27, 1979, Lord Mountbatten was killed when McMahon and other IRA terrorists detonated a 50-pound bomb hidden on his fishing vessel Shadow V. Mountbatten, a World War II hero, elder statesman and second cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, was spending the day with his family in Donegal Bay off Ireland’s northwest coast when the bomb exploded. Three others were killed in the attack, including Mountbatten’s 14-year-old grandson, Nicholas. Later that day, an IRA bombing attack on land killed 18 British paratroopers in County Down, Northern Ireland.

CRIME

1876

“Boss” Tweed delivered to authorities

William Magear “Boss” Tweed, leader of New York City’s corrupt Tammany Hall political organization during the 1860s and early 1870s, is delivered to authorities in New York City after his capture in Spain. Tweed became a powerful figure in Tammany Hall—New York City’s Democratic political machine—in the late 1850s. By the mid 1860s, he had risen to the top position in the organization and formed the “Tweed Ring,” which openly bought votes, encouraged judicial corruption, extracted millions from city contracts, and dominated New York City politics. The Tweed Ring reached its peak of fraudulence in 1871 with the remodeling of the City Court House, a blatant embezzlement of city funds that was exposed by The New York Times. Tweed and his flunkies hoped the criticism would blow over, but thanks to the efforts of opponents such as Harper’s Weekly political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who conducted a crusade against Tweed, virtually every Tammany Hall member was swept from power in the elections of November 1871.

19TH CENTURY

1859

Legendary outlaw Billy the Kid is born

The infamous Western outlaw known as “Billy the Kid” is mostly likely born in a poor Irish neighborhood on New York City’s East Side on November 23, 1859. (Much about his early life is unknown or unverified.) Before he was shot dead at age 21, Billy reputedly killed at least nine people in the American West.

WORLD WAR II

1940

Romania becomes an Axis “power”

On November 23, 1940, Romania signs the Tripartite Pact, officially allying itself with Germany, Italy and Japan. As early as 1937, Romania had come under control of a fascist government that bore great resemblance to that of Germany’s, including similar anti-Jewish laws. 

CRIME

1959

The Birdman of Alcatraz is allowed a small taste of freedom

Robert Stroud, the famous “Birdman of Alcatraz,” is released from solitary confinement for the first time since 1916. Stroud gained widespread fame and attention when author Thomas Gaddis wrote a biography that trumpeted Stroud’s ornithological expertise. 

US GOVERNMENT

1981

President Reagan gives CIA authority to establish the Contras

President Ronald Reagan signs off on a top secret document, National Security Decision Directive 17 (NSDD-17), which gives the Central Intelligence Agency the power to recruit and support a 500-man force of Nicaraguan rebels to conduct covert actions against the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. A budget of $19 million was established for that purpose.