Life has been the name of two notable magazines published in the United States.

LIFE, the photojournalism magazine

The best known is LIFE, the photojournalism magazine founded by Henry Luce in 1936 and owned by Time Warner. Its first issue was dated November 23.

LIFE was published weekly until dwindling circulations for magazines as a whole, coupled with rising advertising rates, caused the magazine to print its final weekly issue in December 1972 (its annual "Year in Review" edition). From there, LIFE was published fortnightly from 1974 to 1978, and was restarted as a monthly magazine in October, 1978. A weekly Life in Time of War was published for a month or two during the first Gulf War. Monthly publication ceased in 2000.

LIFE's original mission was "to see life; see the world." The magazine has published some of the most iconic images of events in the United States and the world.

LIFE 2004

Starting in October 2004, LIFE resumed weekly publication, this time as a supplement to U.S. newspapers. At its launch, it was distributed with over seventy newspapers; these had a combined circulation of over 12 million:

LIFE's ten most important events of the second millennium

The magazine ranked its top ten events of the millennium:

1. Bookprint (Johann Gutenberg, 1455)
2. Discovery of New World (Christopher Columbus, 1492)
3. A new major religion (Martin Luther, 1527)
4. Steam engine starts industrial revolution (James Watt, 1769)
5. Earth revolves around sun (Galileo Galilei, 1610)
6. Germ theory of disease (Louis Pasteur, 1864; Robert Koch,1876)
7. Gunpowder weapons (China, 1100)
8. Declaration of independence (US, 1776)
9. Adolf Hitler comes to power (1933)
10. Compass goes to sea (China, 1117)

This list has been criticised for being overly focused on Western achievements. For example, the Chinese also invented a variant of book print long before Gutenberg, and until the mid 18th century the bulk of the world's printed material was Chinese.

LIFE's 100 most important people of the second millennium

The magazine also published a list of the "100 Most Important People in the Last 1000 Years":

Thomas Edison Christopher Columbus Martin Luther Galileo Galilei Leonardo Da Vinci Isaac Newton Ferdinand Magellan Louis Pasteur Charles Darwin Thomas Jefferson William Shakespeare Napoleon Bonaparte Adolf Hitler Zheng He Henry Ford Sigmund Freud Richard Arkwright Karl Marx Nicolaus Copernicus Orville and Wilbur Wright Albert Einstein Mohandas Gandhi Kublai Khan James Madison Simón Bolívar Mary Wollstonecraft Guglielmo Marconi Mao Zedong Vladimir Lenin Martin Luther King Jr. Alexander Graham Bell René Descartes Ludwig Van Beethoven Thomas Aquinas Abraham Lincoln Michelangelo Vasco Da Gama Suleyman the Magnificent Samuel F. B. Morse John Calvin Florence Nightingale Hernán Cortés Joseph Lister Ibn Battuta Zhu Xi Gregor Mendel John Locke Akbar Marco Polo Dante Alighieri

John D. Rockefeller Jean Jacques Rousseau Niels Bohr Joan of Arc Frederick Douglass Louis XIV of France Nikola Tesla Immanuel Kant Fan Kuan Otto von Bismarck William the Conqueror Guido of Arezzo John Harrison Pope Innocent III Hiram Maxim Jane Addams Cao Xueqin Matteo Ricci Louis Armstrong Michael Faraday Ibn Sina Simone de Beauvoir Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi Adam Smith Marie Curie Andrea Palladio Peter the Great Pablo Picasso Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre Antoine Laurent Lavoisier Phineas Taylor Barnum Edwin Hubble Susan B. Anthony Raphael Helen Keller Hokusai Theodor Herzl Elizabeth I of England Claudio Monteverdi Walt Disney Nelson Mandela Roger Bannister Leo Tolstoy John Von Neumann Santiago Ramon y Cajal Jacques Cousteau Catherine de Medici Ibn Khaldun Kwame Nkrumah Carolus Linnaeus

1922 cover, "The Flapper" by F. X. Leyendecker

This list, too, was sometimes criticized. Edison's number one ranking was challenged since there were others whose inventions (combustion engine, car, electricity-making machines, for example) which had greater impact than Edison's. The top 100 list was further criticised for mixing world-famous people of humankind, such as Newton and Einstein and Luther and da Vinci, with numerous Americans largely unknown outside of the United States.

Well-known employees

• Alfred Eisenstaedt (photojournalist)
• Margaret Bourke-White (photojournalist)
• Robert Capa (photojournalist)
• Gordon Parks (photojournalist)
• Lee Miller (photojournalist)

Life 1880s-1920s

The first "Life Magazine" was a weekly publication put out by the Life Publishing Company of Manhattan, New York City. It was known for its cartoons, pin up girl art, humorous pieces, and reviews of theater and cinema.

In 1908 Robert Ripley publishes his first cartoon in Life, Ripley in turn becomes first publisher of Charles Schulz, of Peanuts fame.

In 1918 Charles Dana Gibson became the magazine's president.

External links

• Life magazine website
• Life's Millennium list I
• Life's Millennium list II
• LIFE to Return as Weekend Magazine