Life Magazine in 1949

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Continuing my look at Life Magazines on Internet Archive….

As I looked at the issues from 1949, the advertisements often stood out (for fossil fuels, Pillsbury, Lionel trains, train travel, World Book Encyclopedia) …and also items that were the beginnings that of things that have developed since then: farmers using lady bugs to control insects on crops, the launch of Viking II, Prince Charles (now King) as a baby, shale oil, a pipeline in Saudi Arabia, big oil in west Texas). Some articles referenced back to World War II: art depicting the Germans trying to burn out London and war babies starting first grade. Evident the cold in the first months of 1949 were very damaging in the Midwest and there was heavy snow in the Cascades in May!

The Life pictures are windows into what the publishers (and a lot of other people) thought was newsworthy in 1949.

Life Magazine 1949-01-03 - Farmers use ladybugs to control mealy bugs

Life Magazine 1949-01-11 - Picture of 28-day old Prince Charles

Life Magazine 1949-01-17 - Death through the Midwest from winter storms

Life Magazine 1949-01-23 - Puerto Rico housing, hotel, dam

Life Magazine 1949-01-30 - Truman inaugural, toddler sleeps in stroller afterward

Life Magazine 1949-02-07 - Mr. Churchill on holiday in Provence

Life Magazine 1949-02-14 - West fights worst winter in history

Life Magazine 1949-02-21 - Mauna Loa erupts

Life Magazine 1949-02-28 - Firemen’s paintings recall how the Germans tried to burn London out

 Life Magazine 1949-03-07 - Longwood Gardens Conservatory (called DuPont greenhouse in the article)

Life Magazine 1949-03-14 - Natural Bridge…Navajo sheep

Life Magazine 1949-03-21 - How oil builds for tomorrow (interesting that the illustration for the ad looks rather dystopian)

Life Magazine 1949-03-28 - Trans-Arabian Pipeline in Saudi Arabia

Life Magazine 1949-04-04 - Barcelona slum…and a palace

Life Magazine 1949-04-11 - Spring in Mississippi

Life Magazine 1949-04-18 - Weighing less than pie meringue, plastic froth can float on gas

Life Magazine 1949-04-25 - Hazford Rubert LXXXI – the grand old man of Hereford bulls

 Life Magazine 1949-05-02 - Texas bluebonnets

Life Magazine 1949-05-09 - Blue Bell play clothes

Life Magazine 1949-05-16 - Volkswagen Factory

Life Magazine 1949-05-23 - African Animals (flamingo and crowned crane)

Life Magazine 1949-05-30 - Snow drifts in May (Cascade Mountains)

Life Magazine 1949-06-06 - Niagara Falls paintings

Life Magazine 1949-06-13 - Go by Train! (advertisement)

Life Magazine 1949-06-20 - Skyline Drive (Shenandoah National Park)

Life Magazine 1949-06-27 - New Harvest adds to big wheat harvest

 Life Magazine 1949-07-11 - Grasshopper plague from Illinois to California

Life Magazine 1949-07-18 - Oil is mined in Colorado (oil shale)

Life Magazine 1949-07-25 - Yosemite National Park

Life Magazine 1949-08-01 - Jackie Robinson

Life Magazine 1949-08-08 - Arms for Europe

Life Magazine 1949-08-15 - Polio (uncontrollable disease)

Life Magazine 1949-08-22 - Earthquake in Ecuador – 5,000 dead

Life Magazine 1949-08-29 - Margaret Mitchell dies (after being hit by a car)

 Life Magazine 1949-09-05 - Swiss watchmaker

Life Magazine 1949-09-12 - Tito defies the Kremlin

Life Magazine 1949-09-12 - The war babies hit the first grade

Life Magazine 1949-09-26 - Soviet citizen prisoners marched off by the thousands

Life Magazine 1949-10-03 - The Viking’s flight

Life Magazine 1949-10-10 - Robert Oppenheimer

Life Magazine 1949-10-17 - Fall tree lined road in New Hampshire

Life Magazine 1949-10-24 - How to choose your Christmas cards (Grandma Moses)

Life Magazine 1949-10-31 – Petra

 Life Magazine 1949-11-07 - World Book Encyclopedia (advertisement)

Life Magazine 1949-11-14 - Holiday cooky (Pillsbury)

Life Magazine 1949-11-21 - Deformed fish reveal radiation effects

Life Magazine 1949-11-28 - Lionel train (advertisement)

Life Magazine 1949-12-05 - West Texas taps a big oil pool

Life Magazine 1949-12-12 - US constructs 60,000 miles of highway

Life Magazine 1949-12-19 - Christmas lights

Life Magazine 1949-12-26 - Armstrongs see the country…. (road trip)

Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes

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The Corcoran Gallery of Art organized an exhibit of art featuring Niagara Falls in 1985. The exhibit book is available for browsing on Internet Archive. There are four essays included:

  • Nature’s Grand Scene in Art

  • An American Icon

  • Doing Niagara Falls in the Nineteenth Century

  • The Role of Niagara in America’s Scenic Preservation

Or – just browse the book for the art! I’ve selected 4 sample images…there are a lot more to be found by browsing the whole book (link below).

Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes, 1697-1901

14 eBooks about Niagara Falls

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In May, I found lots of books about Niagara Falls on Internet Archive and I’m featuring 14 of them in this post. They are free – easily viewed online with the lines I’ve provided. The books are from a Canadian collection of books (Brock University) and range from 1843 to 1922. There were three from the 1840s – showing that it was a tourist destination early on. (1843, 1845, 1846)

There were already boats going to the base of the fall by the 1850s. (1852)

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A book from 1860 provided a panoramic view of the Niagara River (with the falls at the top).

There were trains to be place by the 1880s (1884, 1888)

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And there were visitors even in the winter by then too. (1884)

That continued into the 1890s. (1997, 1998)

In the first decade of the 1900s the boats were still popular….but there was a cable car too. (1900, 1901, 1910)

The last page of a book copyrighted in 1922 included an annotated map of the falls area that had been created in 1893.

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Gleanings of the Week Ending February 17, 2018

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Who’s still smoking: Report highlights populations still at risk -- ScienceDaily – I rarely see people smoking these days. The overall smoking rates in the US has dropped from 42% in 1965 to 15% in 2015. The analysis of the types of individuals in that 15% reveals that there are populations vulnerable…and that novel interventions will be needed to further reduce smoking in the US.

Top 25 Wild Birds Against Spectacular Landscapes – National Geographic Blog – I’m thinking about birds even more than usual this weekend – participating in the Great Backyard Bird Count!

Being A Homebody Has A Surprising Environmental Upside | CleanTechnica – I know that I used less gasoline and don’t spend as much on clothes as I used to when I went into the office every day….evidently there are enough people that are working at home or retired that the energy savings is significant. Now to just make the energy we use at home skew further toward the renewable variety!

Magnesium makes chromosomes: A new chemical tool, MARIO, shows how free Mg2+ ions regulate chromosome shape -- ScienceDaily – Some work by Japanese researchers. They note at the end of this blurb that this new understanding about magnesium may be a piece to the puzzle of how cancer happens…and maybe treatment.

LASER SCANS REVEAL MAYA “MEGALOPOLIS” BELOW GUATEMALAN JUNGLE | National Geographic - National Geographic – more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features….under the jungles of northern Guatemala. The civilization peaked some 1,200 years ago and was comparable to ancient Greece or China. There were probably 10-15 million people in the area too – far more than previously estimated. The LiDAR also revealed pits from looters.

Woodpeckers show signs of possible brain damage, but that might not be a bad thing -- ScienceDaily – Analysis of woodpecker brains from collections of the Field Museum and Harvard Museum of Natural History. The picture with the article is of a downy woodpecker…one kind of woodpecker we see in our area.

Mushrooms Are Good for You, But Are They Medicine? – The question is still open…but they taste good so why not enjoy them even if they aren’t medicine!

Another Kind of Migration: A Visit to Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve – National Geographic Blog – I just found out recently that they’ve planted milkweed at all the schools in our county…and will be monitoring to make sure it thrives…a little action to help the Monarch butterflies as they come through our part of Maryland on their way to Canada.

Surreal Images of Frozen Niagara Falls at Night by Adam Klekotka – Winter eye candy.

Black Lung Study Finds Biggest Cluster Ever of Fatal Coal Miners’ Disease: NPR – So sad. It’s happening to younger miners than it used to; ‘improvements’ in mining equipment? This is probably another reason we should move to renewable energy as quickly as we can.