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'Hindesight' is a 40 minute arts documentary made to mark the return visit to Ireland of John Hinde and his wife Jutta for the opening of a retrospective exhibition of his photographic and postcard work at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in the summer of 1993.

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'Hindesight' is a 40 minute arts documentary made to mark the return visit to Ireland of John Hinde and his wife Jutta for the opening of a retrospective exhibition of his photographic and postcard work at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in the summer of 1993.

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Why Stories Matter - Dylan Marron (NerdCon: Stories 2015)

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Why Stories Matter - Dylan Marron (NerdCon: Stories 2015)

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Why Stories Matter - Dylan Marron (NerdCon: Stories 2015)

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Dylan Marron presents the Every Single Word project, which documents every word spoken by a person of color in popular films. http://everysinglewordspoken.tumblr.com/ ----- NerdCon: Stories is an annual conference created to celebrate the institution of storytelling. Learn more at http://nerdcon.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/nerdconstories Facebook: http://facebook.com/nerdconstories Tumblr: http://nerdconstories.tumblr.com Instagram: http://instagram.com/nerdconstories

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Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Colour ... (2015 -

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Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Colour ... (2015 -

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Dylan Marron

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Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in "Friends With Benefits"

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This is every single word spoken by a person of color in the 2011 film "Friends With Benefits." Starring Christopher Baskerville (uncredited in film), Masi O...

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Every Donald Trump Sniff from the Debate

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Every Donald Trump Sniff from the Debate

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September 2016

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Howard Dean Stands By Cocaine Tweet About Donald Trump

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Every Donald Trump Sniff from the Debate

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Every Trump sniffle / sniffing from the presidential debate on 9/26/16 between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.. Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

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"Qaeda, quality, question, quickly, quickly quiet" (2003) by Lenka Clayton

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"Qaeda, quality, question, quickly, quickly quiet" (2003) by Lenka Clayton

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Qaeda, quality, question, quickly, quickly quiet

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This is "Qaeda, quality, question, quickly, quickly quiet" by on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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The Most Controversial Magazine Covers of All Time

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The Most Controversial Magazine Covers of All Time

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Depictions of Beauty on Cosmopolitan Magazine:A Content Analysis of Covers (1959-2014)

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Depictions of Beauty on Cosmopolitan Magazine:A Content Analysis of Covers (1959-2014)

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The media, especially advertisers, have long used beautiful women as an ideal image for attracting viewers and selling products. American women have been portrayed as, ideally, thin Caucasians with blonde hair and blue eyes. Research has found that women compare themselves to the beautiful women in advertising and in turn have negative feelings towards their own appearance. This thesis’ goal is to find whether the ideal American woman has changed through a content analysis of the women on the covers of Cosmopolitan magazine over the past 55 years, 1959 through 2014. This content analysis will focus on how the covers changed depending on who was the editor-in-chief at the time. The content analysis will begin with the cover from 1959 because that is when celebrities began to appear on covers. Knowing whether the ideal look of the American woman has changed will gauge how further research should be done on how women are comparing themselves to these women and then feeling afterwards.

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Today's blog post will build on what we learned from last week: how to construct an image scraper using Python + Scrapy to scrape ~4,000 Time magazine cover images.

So now that we have this dataset, what are we going to do with it?

Great question.

One of my favorite visual analysis techniques to apply when examining these types of homogenous datasets is to simply average the images together over a given temporal window (i.e. timeframe). This average is a straightforward operation. All we need to do is loop over every image in our dataset (or subset) and maintain the average pixel intensity value for every (x, y)-coordinate.

By computing this average, we can obtain a singular representation of what the image data (i.e. Time magazine covers) looks like over a given timeframe. It's a simple, yet highly effective method when exploring visual trends in a dataset.

In the remainder of this blog post, we'll group our Time magazine cover dataset into 10 groups - one group for each of the 10 decades Time magazine has been in publication. Then, for each of these groups, we'll compute the average of all images in the group, giving us a single visual representation of how the Time cover images looked. This average image will allow us to identify visual trends in the cover images; specifically, marketing and advertising techniques used by Time during a given decade.

Analyzing 91 years of Time magazine covers for visual trends

Before we dive into this post, it might be helpful to read through our previous lesson on scraping Time magazine cover images - reading the previous post is certainly not a requirement, but does help in giving some context.

That said, let's go ahead and get started. Open up a new file, name it , and let's get coding:

Lines 2-6 simply import our necessary packages - nothing too exciting here.

We then define a utility function, filter_by_decade on Line 8. As the name suggests, this method will go through our scraped cover images and pull out all covers that fall within a specified decade. Our filter_by_decade function requires two arguments: the decade we want to grab cover images for, along with data , which is simply the data from our previous post.

Now that our method is defined, let's move on to the body of the function. We'll initialize filtered , a list of rows in data that match our decade criterion ( Line 10).

We then loop over each row in the data ( Line 13), extract the publication date ( Line 15), and then update our filtered list, provided that the publication date falls within our specified decade ( Lines 19 and 20).

Finally, the filtered list of rows is returned to the caller on Line 23.

Now that our helper function is defined, let's move on to parsing command line arguments and loading our file:

Again, here the code is quite simple. Lines 26-29 handle parsing command line arguments. We only need a single switch here, -- visualizations , which is the path to the directory where we will store our average cover images for each decade between 1920 and 2010.

We then load the file on Line 32 (again, which was generated from our previous post on scraping images with Python + Scrapy).

We are now ready to perform the actual analysis on the Time magazine cover dataset:

We start by looping over each decade between 1920 and 2010 on Line 35 and initialize a list, covers , to store the actual cover images for the current decade .

For each of decade, we need to pull out all rows from that fall within the decade range. Luckily, this is quite easy since we have our filter_by_decade method defined above.

The next step is to load the current cover image from disk on Line 43. If the image is None , then we know there was an issue loading the cover from disk - this happens for about 3 images in the dataset, which is likely due to a download problem or a network issue during the scraping process.

Provided that the cover is not None , we we need to resize it to a canonical, known size so we can compute the average of each pixel location ( Line 51). Here we resize the image to be a fixed 400 x 527 pixels, ignoring the aspect ratio - the resized image is then flattened into a list of 400 x 527 x 3= 632,400 pixels (the 3 comes from the Red, Green, and Blue channels of the image). If we do not resize the cover to a fixed size, then our rows will not line up and we will be unable to compute the average image for the decade range.

The flattened cover is then accumulated into the covers list on Line 52.

The actual true "analysis" of the decade's worth of cover images takes place on Line 56 using the function. Every Time magazine cover image is represented by a flattened row in the covers list. Therefore, to compute the average of all covers across a decade, all we need to do is take the mean pixel value of each column. This will leave us with a single list (again, of 632,400-dim), representing the mean value of each Red, Green, and Blue pixel at each (x, y)-coordinate.

However, since the avg image is represented as 1D list of floating point values, we cannot visualize it. First, we need to reshape the avg image to have a width of 400 pixels, a height of 527 pixels, and a depth of 3 (for each of the Red, Green, and Blue channels, respectively). Finally, since OpenCV expects 8-bit, unsigned integers, we'll go ahead and convert to uint8 from the float data type returned from .

Finally, Lines 57 and 58 take our avg cover image and write it to disk.

To run our script just execute the following command:

After a few seconds, you should see the following images in your visualizations directory:

Results

We now have 10 images in our visualizations directory, an average each for each of the 10 decades Time magazine has been in publication.

But what do these visualizations actually mean? And what types of insights can we gain from examining them?

As it turns out, quite a lot - especially with respect to how Time performed marketing and advertising with their covers over the past 90+ years:

Originally, the cover of Time magazine was ALL black and white. But in the late 1920's the we can see they started to transfer over to the now iconic red border. However, all other aspects of the cover (including the portrait centerpiece) are still in black and white.

The Time logo always appears at the top of the cover.

Ornate designs frame the cover portrait on the left and right.

Time is now fully committed to their red border, which has actually grown in thickness slightly.

Overall, not much as changed in the design from the 1920's to the 1930's.

The first change we notice is that the red border is not the only color! The portrait of the cover subject is starting to be printed in color. Given that there seems to be a fair amount of color in the portrait region, this change likely took place in the early 1940's.

Another subtle alternation is the change in "The Weekly News Magazine" typography directly underneath the "TIME" text.

It's also worth noting that the "TIME" text itself is substantially more fixed (i.e. very little variation in placement) as opposed to previous decades.

The 1950's cover images demonstrate a dramatic change in Time magazine, both in terms of cover format and marketing and advertising.

To start, the portrait, once framed by a white border/ornate designs is now expanded to blanket the entire cover - a trend that continues to the modern day.

Meta-information (such as the name of the issue and publication date) have always been published on the magazine covers; however, we are now starting to see a very fixed and highly formatted version of this meta-information in the four corners of the magazine.

Most notable is the change in marketing and advertising by using diagonal yellow bars to highlight the cover story of the issue.

The first thing you'll notice about the 1960's Time cover is a change in the "TIME" text. While the text appears to be purple, it's actually a transition from black to red (which averages out to be a purple-ish color). All previous decades of Time used black text for their logo, but in the 1960's we can see that they converted to their now modern day red.

Secondly, you'll see that the "TIME" text is highlighted with a white border which is used to give contrast between the logo and the centerpiece.

Time is still using diagonal bars for marketing, allowing them to highlight the cover story - but the bars are now more "white" than they are yellow". The width of the bars has also been slimmed down by 1/3.

Here we see another big change in marketing and advertising strategy - Time is starting to use faux page folds (top-right corner), allowing us to get a "sneak peek" of what's inside the issue.

Also note the barcode that is starting to appear in the bottom-left corner of the issue.

The white border surrounding the "TIME" text has been removed.

The 1980's issues of Time seem to continue the same faux page fold marketing strategy from the 1970's.

They also have re-inserted the white border surrounding the "TIME" text.

A barcode is now predominately used in the bottom-left corner.

But also note that a barcode is starting to appear in the bottom-right corner as well.

Once again, the white border surrounding "TIME" is gone - it makes me curious what types of split tests they were running during these years to figure out if the white border contributed to more sales of the magazine.

The barcode now consistently appears on the bottom-left and bottom-right corners of the magazine, the choice of barcode placement being highly dependent on aesthetics.

Also notice that the faux page fold which, which survived nearly two decades, is now gone.

Lastly, note how the "TIME" logo has become quite variable in size.

The variable logo size has become more pronounced in the 2000's era.

We can also see the barcode is completely gone.

We now arrive at the modern day Time magazine cover.

Overall, there isn't much difference between the 2010's and 2000's.

However, the size of the Time logo itself seems to be substantially less varied, and only fluctuates along the y-axis.

Summary

In this blog post we explored our Time magazine cover dataset which we gathered in the previous lesson.

To perform a visual analysis of the dataset and identify trends and changes in the magazine covers, we averaged covers together across multiple decades. Given the ten decades Time has been in publication, this left us with ten separate visual representations.

Overall, the changes in covers may seem subtle, but they are actually quite insightful to how the magazine has evolved, specifically in regards to marketing and advertising.

The changes in:

1. Logo color and white bordering

2. Banners to highlight the cover story

3. And faux page folds

Clearly demonstrate that Time magazine was trying to determine which strategies were "eye catching" enough for readers to grab a copy off their local newsstand.

Furthermore, their flip-flopping between white bordering and no white bordering indicates to me that they were performing a series of split tests, accumulating decades worth of data, that eventually resulted in their current, modern day logo.

Downloads:

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Analyzing 91 years of Time magazine covers for visual trends - PyImageSearch

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Today's blog post will build on what we learned from last week: how to construct an image scraper using Python + Scrapy to scrape ~4,000 Time magazine cover images. So now that we have this dataset, what are we going to do with it? Great question.

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Characteristics of Time Magazine cover subjects, 1946-1971: a content analysis.

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Items in CURVE are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. They are made available with permission from the author(s).

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Check out the online archives of TIME Magazine: complete coverage since 1923 of world news, politics, entertainment, science, health, history, business and more

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LIFE Magazine and Modernity | Arts | The Harvard Crimson

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In an hour-long presentation, Renn highlighted important events in LIFE's 36-year history, from its inception by Henry Luce in 1936 to its promotion of Regionalist, figurative, and abstract painters, female and African-American artists, and even modern architects.

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Erika Doss, ed. Looking at Life Magazine. Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. xiv + 286 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-56098-989-9.

Reviewed by Mark Rice (Department of American Studies, St. John Fisher College)
Published on H-Amstdy (January, 2003)

For more than thirty years, from the 1930s to the 1970s, Life magazine was one of the most important magazines published in the United States. One study revealed that in a given thirteen-week period in 1950, "about half of all Americans, ten years and older, had seen one or more copies" of the magazine (p. 42), suggesting the range and scope of the magazine's potential audience. Promoted by its founder, Henry Luce, to be "The Show-Book of the World," for an imagined national audience whom Luce wanted to entertain and instruct through a format of photo essays that the magazine perfected, Life's readership was actually primarily urban and suburban, white, and middle-class. Moreover, "the world" that Luce promised to deliver to his readers was a world that was defined and revealed through the magazine's own editorial policies. Nevertheless, it is difficult to dispute the significance of Life both as a publishing phenomenon and as a cultural symbol of post-World War II American life. Thirty years after its demise as a weekly magazine ( Life reappeared for several years as a monthly magazine and continues to publish "special issues" occasionally), Life maintains its grip on the minds and memories of many Americans. Still stored in countless basement and attic collections, Life has the power to evoke both nostalgic longings for a supposedly "simpler" time in the nation's past and condescending sneers from more "enlightened" folk who recognize the magazine's limited perspective.

In recent years, Life magazine has become the subject of serious attention by scholars interested in the intent and the impact of what is arguably the most important magazine ever to be published in the United States. In 1994, Wendy Kozol published Life's America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism, which studied the ideals of middle-class domesticity in the pages of Life. Now, in a volume that both complements and enriches Kozol's study, comes Looking at Life Magazine, a book whose genesis was a 1995 conference hosted by the American Studies Program at the University of Colorado called, "Looking at Life: Rethinking America's Favorite Magazine, 1936 to 1972." Drawing together a diverse range of scholars, the four-day gathering was the first academic conference "to center specifically on how Life magazine ... shaped and influenced ideas about class, ethnicity, gender, and race in America, and throughout the world" (p. xiii), a description that suggests what the book is about. Edited by the art historian, Erika Doss, Looking at Life Magazine is a lively and engaging collection of essays written by a number of leading historians, art historians, and media-studies specialists, including Doss, Peter Bacon Hales, Neil Harris, and Kozol. As befits a book that is concerned with " Life's look: its visual style" (p. 19) Looking at Life Magazine is artfully designed and is heavily illustrated with black-and-white reproductions of photographs and advertisements that appeared in the magazine's pages.

The twelve essays in Looking at Life Magazine cover a wide range of subjects, with many of them, indeed, about issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and race, in addition to such other topics as the iconography of the atomic age and the coverage of political extremism in World War II-era America. While the book delves into some topics that the reader might not expect to see, other entries that one might expect to encounter are absent. For example, there are no essays examining 1950s youth culture, postwar domesticity, or the magazine's coverage of mainstream American politics. However, there are essays that discuss wartime images of the Chinese, American corporate culture, religion in the United States, racial segregation, and the magazine's regular feature, " Life Goes to a Party."

The essays are separated into five parts, each of which takes its name from a single passage from Luce's prospectus for the magazine, or else from passages edited and arranged to suggest the overarching theme of the part. For example, in Part 1, "To See Life" (as Luce's prospectus begins), the meaning of the word "Life" is playfully doubled. Not only does "Life" refer to all of humanity (as Luce would have it), but also it more directly refers to the magazine itself so that, by analyzing the editorial decisions and the audience of Life, the limits of Luce's vision become magnified. "To See Life" includes Terry Smith's essay, " Life-Style Modernity: Making Modern America," which discusses the relationship between a modernist visual aesthetic and the promotion of a particular kind of American Dream in the pages of Life, and James Baughman's essay, "Who Read Life? The Circulation of America's Favorite Magazine," which is an especially useful study that deflates the notion that Life was read by virtually everyone in the country. Similarly, in Part 4, "To See Things Thousands of Miles Away, Things Hidden Behind Walls and Within Rooms, Things Dangerous to Come To; The Women That Men Love" the essays revolve around topics that threaten the white, middle-class, conservative, and heterosexual "norm" that Luce envisioned. These essays include a discussion about masculinity and homoeroticism in the pages of Life by John Ibson, Rickie Solinger's analysis of "The Smutty Side of Life," and Erika Doss's study of the career of Gordon Parks at the magazine, a career that included sympathetic images of Harlem gang leaders and leaders of the Black Panther Party.

The book's organization allows the essays to move simultaneously in two directions: while moving in a rough chronology from the magazine's founding in 1936 to its folding in 1972, the essays also move laterally through the various realms of "life" that Luce promised his magazine would reveal. Using Luce's words to name the five parts also works as a centripetal force that binds what might otherwise seem disparate essays. Ironically, the use of Luce's prospectus works better in the book than it did in the pages of Life. More than one of the essays points out that Luce's attempt to present a coherent vision of the world to an imagined unified audience flew in the face of reality. The tensions between unity and diversity, between the tidiness of the magazine and the messiness of the world are what give scholars so much meat to work with in analyzing Life. These tensions, which eventually led to the magazine's undoing, are what most successfully hold the collection together.

There is no concluding essay in Looking at Life Magazine, and--to my mind--that's too bad. While the final essay talks about the unraveling of the consensus mystique that Life tried mightily to hold on to, and does a nice job explaining the magazine's demise, no real effort is made in the volume to tie all of the essays together in a fashion that would allow the reader to put the book down and say, "Ah--so that's what all of these essays mean; that's why Life was so important a magazine." Doss states in the book's introduction that "single-minded or monolithic interpretations of the magazine and its meanings are open to challenge" (p. 7). Looking at Life Magazine's essays certainly make that clear. What remains unclear, however, is how we should combine these multiple interpretations of the magazine with the undeniable appeal that the magazine held for its readers, in order to better know exactly how the magazine achieved its status as cultural icon. How many readers picked up on the homoerotic advertisements published by Life during World War II? Were they the same readers who were interested in stories about the Chinese during the war or about "babes" after the war ended? Of course, we can never know the answer to these questions. Pinning down how the magazine influenced its readers is probably impossible. Perhaps the best description of how we should view the magazine comes from the concluding passage of Baughman's essay: " Life undoubtedly shaped the political and cultural values of many Americans. But they were a minority. Life was not to be found in most homes or apartments. And many non-subscribers occasionally sampling the magazine merely looked at the pictures, while having their hair cut or curled" (p. 48).

I'd say something similar about Looking at Life Magazine. The essays in this book will likely shape the direction of future studies not only of Life magazine, but also of twentieth-century American culture. Theoretically charged, but written in straightforward prose styles, the essays don't over-rely on theoretical jargon. Like the magazine it analyzes, Looking at Life Magazine is both important and just plain interesting.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-amstdy.

Citation: Mark Rice. Review of Doss, Erika, ed., Looking at Life Magazine. H-Amstdy, H-Net Reviews. January, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=7096

Copyright © 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.

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Erika Doss, ed. Looking at Life Magazine. Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. xiv + 286 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-56098-989-9. Reviewed by Mark Rice (Department of American Studies, St. John Fisher College) Published on H-Amstdy (January, 2003) For more than thirty years, from the 1930s to the 1970s, Life magazine was one of the most important magazines published in the United States.

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Last summer in a used bookstore, I happened on an enormous, bound volume of Life magazine, from July-September 1945. I opened to the very first story in the first issue, July 2, 1945. The headline read:

"This Is Art by Piet Mondrian: Mondrian Hated Curves."

Can you imagine a better headline for a story about an artist of squares and rectangles?

I was hooked.

I bought the volume, and some of the happiest and most confounding hours I've spent since have been leafing through it, trying to figure out how and why a 68-year-old weekly news magazine feels more exciting than almost anything I read today. The longer I spent with it, in fact, the more I wondered whether any magazine, ever, has been as interesting, and relevant, and fun, and durable as Life was during those three months.

To understand why, I cataloged and classified the more than 200 stories and photo essays in the volume. For starters, these 13 issues include both the (arguably) most beloved magazine photo of the 20 th century and the (arguably) most important magazine article of the 20 th century. The Aug. 27 issue contains Alfred Eisenstaedt's picture of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square after Japan's surrender. (It's the capstone of a spread of photos titled, "The Men of War Kiss From Coast to Coast.") And the Sept. 10 issue gives 12 pages to Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think," the essay that predicted the information age, personal computers, the Internet, networking, and the democratization of knowledge. Bush's essay had originally run in the Atlantic three months earlier, but the editors of Life, recognizing its profound importance, republished it, and gave it the huge audience that helped make it legend.

It would have been hard for anyone to make a boring magazine in summer 1945, given that these were perhaps the three most eventful months in human history: the end of World War II and the surrender of Japan, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the signing of the U.N. charter, the discovery and initial prosecution of Germany's holocaust crimes. Life's writers and photographers captured an astonishing amount of that history. ( Life was the third great magazine of Henry Luce's empire. Time summarized the world through aggregation, 75 years before aggregation was invented, and Fortune put American business under a microscope. The purpose of Life was: The world in pictures.)

Life ran the aerial photos of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs that you still remember. It visited Hitler's bunker just after Hitler's suicide, and Mussolini's love nest. It traveled home with Audie Murphy, the war's most decorated soldier, and photographed him with his sweetheart, and also with actor and Col. Jimmy Stewart, perhaps the single most famous American in uniform. Life was there for the start of the Nuremberg tribunals, the trial of Norwegian Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling, and the botched suicide attempt of Japanese military leader Hideki Tojo. It took the United Nations charter so seriously that it published photos of every single one of its signatories at the moment he signed the document-a grid of 50. It went on vacation with new President Harry Truman, and rode down the avenues of lower Manhattan with conquering Gen. Dwight Eisenhower at his tickertape parade. Oh, and it also toured the eugenic compound that had housed children of German SS officers, bred to be Aryan superbabies. Life was there.

But it's not just that it was there. The magazine also understood-and defined-the themes would preoccupy the America to come. It speculated about post-war nuclear strategy just days after Hiroshima. The magazine was prescient about issues of terror. John Hersey wrote about Japanese kamikazes, a searing essay about suicidal terrorism that feels alarmingly current. A photo essay chronicled the "military commissions" using new and untested principles of law to prosecute German war criminals and collaborators-a preview of the very fight we've been having over Gitmo's commissions. A photo essay chronicles the crash of a fog-bound B-25 bomber into the Empire State Building, an event that would be recalled on 9/11.

Life sought to prepare its readers for post-war society. There's a sublime photo essay about divorce, with portraits of 22 women (and two men) who got unhitched in Los Angeles on a single day.* The magazine profiled a little-known regional department store, Neiman-Marcus, with the prediction that its brash Texas style could make it a national name. Life was infatuated with American science and engineering, and made the case that the ingenuity that was winning the war would win the future. Every issue explained-with models, illustrations, and high-speed photography-a scientific breakthrough that would shape the post-war world: radar, napalm, air conditioning, nuclear fission, Plexiglas ...

The magazine's eye for culture was sharp. In addition to Mondrian, Life profiled artists Max Weber and Salvador Dali. The magazine serialized Names on the Land, a peculiar book about American place names that would become a cult classic. One tart criticism of Henry Luce's magazines was that " Time is for people who can't think, and Life is for people who can't read or think." But to my 2013 self, the 1945 Life respects subtlety and intelligence of readers more than modern magazines. Consider that Mondrian story: Can you imagine the most popular American magazine of 2013 devoting its first half-dozen pages to a dead, difficult, abstract artist? Life ran an achingly long tribute to John Maynard Keynes, the world's most influential economist. A hefty essay speculated on whether the University of Chicago's great books curriculum should become the model for American higher education. One issue gave six full pages to the history and purpose of the American secretary of state, with huge portraits of a dozen of them. In another issue, you find brief bios of 20 scientists who created nuclear age, from Isaac Newton to J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Does any of 1945 Life feel ridiculous, wrong, or dated? Yes, but surprisingly little. The Hollywood coverage celebrates long-forgotten movies and starlets who never became stars. (Betty Hutton? Peggy Ann Garner?) It's conservative about fashion: One hilarious photo essay on skimpy bathing suits insists they "cannot go any further," even as it depicts models wearing two-piece suits that a grandmother would feel modest in today. And northwest Ohio must wince at this feature: "Toledo: Scale model gives citizens a prophetic look at the wonderful city they could have in 50 years." Not so prophetic. The bigger misstep in Life is what's not there: hardly a word about segregation or poverty.

No contemporary magazine could duplicate Life's success, and not just because 1945 was such a monumental year. No modern magazine has remotely close to its influence. The most popular magazine in America, Life circulated 4 million copies a week, and was read by 13.5 million people-10 percent of the population. The largest weekly magazine now, People, has a smaller circulation than Life even though the U.S. population is 2.5 times as large as it was then. And in an age before TV, Life's photographs were a dominant way that Americans saw the world.

Life could speak to a shared idea of America. As importantly, it wanted to speak to a shared idea of American progress. As Alan Brinkley explains in The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, Luce sought to use Life and Time to outline and enforce a vision of what America should be: optimistic, scientific, inclusive, forward moving. To modern eyes, such confident optimism is unfamiliar, but appealing. Such certainty and such confidence in shared values don't-and couldn't, and probably shouldn't-exist modern journalism.

But Life could depend on having readers who were ready to listen to this vision of America. Fresh off their triumph in the war, their political ideals vindicated, their science and engineering proven the best in the world, Americans were happy to be flattered by Life's positive, optimistic vision of post-war society. The magazine could get away with a universal we that no magazine would dare today. (This is not to say we has vanished from journalism. But what persists is an ideological we, a we of the left or right that's opposed to a wrong-thinking them-not a we that includes all Americans.) The story Life was telling about America wasn't a true story-midcentury America without racial conflict is a fantasy-but it was truish, and it was a story that many Americans wanted to hear.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature from the summer of 1945 was a 10-page spread about American folk songs. Overlaid on full-page photographs of appropriate American icons-a church, a steam engine-are the lyrics to folk songs: "Home on the Range," "O Susanna," "America the Beautiful," and others. It's sappy, and powerful, and not cynical at all. And every time I look at it, I sing.

Correction, Jan. 3, 2014: This article originally misstated how many women and men were photographed in a Life spread about divorce in Los Angeles. There were 22 women and two men, not 23 women and one man. (Return.)

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The Best Magazine Ever Published Was Life Magazine, in Summer 1945

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Last summer in a used bookstore, I happened on an enormous, bound volume of Life magazine, from July-September 1945. I opened to the very first story in the first issue, July 2, 1945. The headline read: "This Is Art by Piet Mondrian: Mondrian Hated Curves."

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Previously a publication only for the National Geographic Society (NGS),  it is now a media empire and as a brand is a globally recognised institution whose motto is "Inspire, illuminate, teach"

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Complete online archive of National Geographic magazines: articles, photographs and maps since 1888.