November 23 · This Day in America
On November 23, 1936, the first issue of LIFE reaches newsstands, and a publisher's gamble becomes a national habit. Henry Luce had relaunched the title with a radical promise: where Time told the news, LIFE would show it. His prospectus reads like a creed — "to see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events… to see and be amazed." On the cover is Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of the towering spillways of Fort Peck Dam, raw and monumental. Sent to shoot New Deal engineering, she came back with the human document of a frontier boomtown instead, and the editors ran it. The issue sold out in hours; circulation passed a million within a year. For the next three decades, this was how Americans witnessed war, presidents, the moon, and one another — in a single luminous black-and-white frame. A country learned to look at itself.
Source: www.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1804
On November 23, 1804, the future fourteenth president is born in a log cabin in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, son of a Revolutionary War veteran who became the state's governor. Handsome and well-liked, Pierce reached the White House in 1853 — and is now remembered chiefly for signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which reopened the wound of slavery in the territories and helped push the country toward civil war. Even a charmed beginning can lead somewhere the nation never wanted to go.
Source: www.whitehousehistory.org