On November 23, 1936, the first issue of the picture magazine Life is published, featuring a cover photo of the Fort Peck Dam’s spillway by Margaret Bourke-White. The issue had a cover price of 10 cents.

Life Magazine began earlier in the 20th century as a weekly humor publication, featuring humorous pieces and cultural reporting. When the original Life folded during the Great Depression, American publisher Henry Luce bought the name and re-launched the magazine as a picture-based periodical on this day in 1936.

Life was a success in its first year of publication. It changed the way people looked at the world by changing the way people could look at the world. Its images captured historic and everyday events with equally vivid intensity, putting moments on display for the world to process. At its peak, Life had a circulation of more than 8 million.

The magazine suffered as television became society’s predominant means of communication and ceased publishing as a weekly in 1972, as it lost readers and advertising dollars to television. Between 2004 and 2007, Life resumed weekly publication as a supplement to American newspapers.