Are you experiencing FOMO watching all your friends travel to distant places for their summer vacation? Too broke or too busy to fly? The library has just purchased two first-class tickets to the most exotic and hard-to-reach destination of all: the past. Travel back in time with our new archive collection: Time Magazine Archive and Life Magazine Archive.
These two American magazines covered news events, popular culture, and daily life for Americans during most of the twentieth century. They were the most popular weekly news and entertainment magazines of their time, and both were noteable for their award-winning photography and writing.
Time Magazine began in 1923 as a weekly magazine, and may be familiar to many for their most famous feature story: “Person of the Year.” It is still in print today, but the archive database provides full cover-to-cover PDFs for every issue published between 1923 and 2000. Between its pages, you’ll find interviews from the most famous celebrities, world leaders, authors, scientists, and thinkers of the past 100 years.
Life Magazine, published from 1883 until 2000, is best known for its photographic excellence in documenting American life and world events during the 1930s through the 1970s. If you’ve ever seen the iconic World War II victory photograph of a nurse being kissed by a sailor, it was first published in Life magazine.
That photograph and many others are fully searchable and delivered through the archive database. You can browse and keyword search all available issues from 1936-2000.
The landing page for both databases features the familiar search box of an Ebscohost Database.
You can search by keyword, author, subjects, or article title. You can limit results by illustrations, as well as date and subject. If you would rather browse issues by date, click “Publications” at the top of the search page in the blue border. Then click the title of the magazine to navigate by issue.
If you search for “Arkansas Tech University” in the Life Magazine Archive, you’ll find a feature story on the university published February 3rd, 1941. The magazine was photographing a farewell party the university organized for 104 students who were leaving for National Guard training—not knowing at the time if they would be sent to the war raging overseas. Pearl Harbor had not yet been bombed, and the article remarked, “Of all sections, the South is ready to fight Hitler, readiest to risk war to save Britain.”
Unlike other article databases that only display text in html, results for Life Magazine and Time come complete with fully rendered PDFs of the original pages—ads and all.
Want to learn more about these databases and others? Ask Us via chat, email, phone, text, or some ancient form of letter writing. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook to learn about more new collections or events as we return to our present destination on the sacred timeline.
Safe travels this summer—wherever or whenever you go!