It's February, 1942. US Navy Monitors have just tracked a Japanese submarine skulking just outside of San Francisco. A few nights later, a Japanese submarine surfaces off the coast of Santa Barbara and fires a few shells at an oil storage facility. With the memories of Pearl Harbor from last December still fresh, the threat of a Japanese invasion is palpable. Enter Lt. Gen. John L. De Witt, head of Western Defense Command. He is tasked with the daunting order to implement 'passive defense measures' for all vital installations along the Pacific coast. Executing such an order [...]
Abraham Lincoln Mark Twain August Strindberg Alfred Hitchcock [...]
The Beatles, Poised for Worldwide Fame. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr pose in January 1964, just weeks before their historic first visit to America. Beatles Joke and Smoke at San Francisco Press Conference. At press dates, like this one in August 1964 at the start of their U.S. tour, the Beatles offer typically wry remarks. John Lennon quips that he's writing a book called "Snore Wife [...]
Here are some amazing photos of the beautiful Marilyn Monroe. They were taken by Bert Stern and were published in Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting in 1992. Read more »
Be careful! On the unluckiest day of the year, watch out for these superstitious signs of bad luck. Friday the 13th Breaking a Mirror: Seven Years of Bad Luck [...]
Simply put, Elizabeth Taylor was the biggest star of the LIFE era. She appeared on the magazine's cover a record 14 times, starting when she was just 15 years old, and over the following decades many LIFE photographers -- Paul Schutzer, Peter Stackpole, Allan Grant, and George Silk among them -- captured the astonishingly beautiful movie star as she basked in love, work, motherhood, and the kind of international fame that few entertainers these days can ever hope to achieve. But a magazine only has so many pages -- and several stunning images of the Hollywood icon never actually made [...]
The solemn start of the trolleybus service, 1949 "The trolleybuses say farewell to Prague – Prague says farewell to the trolleybuses", 1972 Read more [...]
New York circa 1906. "Manhattan skyline and East River." View full size.
Marilyn Monroe's First LIFE Cover. The actress appears for the first time on the cover of LIFE magazine, April 7, 1952. An observation from the inside feature: "Marilyn never finished high school but she is devoted to the intellectual life. She sprinkles her conversation with lines from Thomas Wolfe and Browning, with the same candid simplicity she uses in describing her dumbbell exercises." Goodbye, Norma Jeane; Hello, Marilyn. Monroe circa 1947, shortly [...]
For his 1948 feature Country Doctor , LIFE magazine photographer W. Eugene Smith spent 23 days in Kremmling, Colorado, shadowing general practitioner Ernest Ceriani. His powerful, intimate images capture in poignant detail the emotional and physical challenges faced by this modest, hard-working rural physician — and gradually reveal the inner workings and the outer trappings of what is clearly a uniquely rewarding life. When first published, 'Country Doctor' was an instant classic, setting Smith firmly on a path as a master of the unique art form of the photoessay, and solidifying his status as one of the [...]
Cats Blackie (black) and Brownie (front) catch squirts of milk during at Arch Badertscher's dairy farm in this 1954 Nan Farber photo. "This picture just makes me smile. Great photographs do not need to be serious, they just need to evoke emotion." — Liz Ronk, Photo Editor, LIFE.com
Good Weather For Airstrikes
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