Ah, Paris. The City of Light. The home of Montmartre, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Seine, the Marais and countless other celebrated neighborhoods and attractions. Thousands of years old, and yet perfectly modern; a world capital of fashion, cuisine and intellectual pursuits; a city rich in character and in history; the perfect place to walk your pet chicken like a dog.
Wait. What?
Here, apropos of nothing, LIFE.com presents a series of photographs by the incomparable Nina Leen, chronicling the Parisian peregrinations of a woman named Marguerite. We know virtually nothing else about her. Her last name is lost to time. The reasons for her fowl habit are shrouded in mystery. But perhaps her anonymity, and the riddle of her daily, poultry-centric rounds, help explain the appeal of these pictures.
Marguerite and her chicken, Paris, 1956.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marguerite and her chicken, Paris, 1956.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marguerite and her chicken, Paris, 1956.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marguerite and her chicken, Paris, 1956.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marguerite’s chicken, Paris, 1956.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marguerite and her chicken, Paris, 1956.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marguerite and her chicken, Paris, 1956.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marguerite (left) and her chicken shared a park bench with a woman who appeared to be rather tense, Paris, 1956.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marguerite and her chicken, Paris, 1956.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marguerite and her chicken, Paris, 1956.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marguerite and her chicken, Paris, 1956.
Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A jarring but necessary revelation that comes to all scientists, eventually, is that the daily practice and pursuit of knowledge isn’t the endless series of thrilling discoveries that they once envisioned. The “scientific method,” after all, is a fancy way of characterizing the slow, measured grind the theorizing and experimenting that defines so much scientific labor. Occasionally, though, teachers emerge with such engaging, energized ways of making science new again that, through their eyes (and occasionally through their antics) the universe regains its power to enthrall.
Hubert Alyea, a Princeton University professor famous for lively, colorful chemistry classes and public talks that were as much performance as professorship was such a teacher. Alyea, who died in 1996 at the age of 93, lectured with an animated, dynamic style that drew enthusiastic audiences of all ages. In the photographs in this gallery, some of which were first published in LIFE in August 1953, his excitement is almost palpable.
“Grimacing with fiendish delight,” LIFE wrote of Alyea’s pyrotechnic teaching, “he sets off explosions, shoots water pistols and sprays his audience with carbon dioxide in the course of 32 harrowing experiments dramatizing complicated theory.” Alyea delivered his talk on the chemistry behind the atomic bomb and atomic energy about 2,800 times all over the world burning several suits of clothing in the process.
Despite his own success, Alyea was well aware of the challenges that got in the way of similar science demonstrations in communities the world over. He developed an inexpensive “armchair chemistry” kit to be used in conjunction with an overhead projection system. This technique allowed for science demonstrations not only throughout the United States but in countries like Thailand, India and Mexico. His fame was noted as far away as Hollywood; the popular 1961 Disney film, The Absent-Minded Professor, starred Fred MacMurray as professor Ned Brainard, whose manic mannerisms in the title role were reportedly modeled largely on Alyea’s.
Alyea’s affiliation with Princeton, meanwhile, was a long one. After earning an undergraduate degree there, he returned for a Ph.D. in 1928. He continued to deliver his hugely popular, poetry-and-ad-lib-filled lectures at Princeton reunions for years after his retirement. (He was on the faculty for 42 years.) He earned honorary degrees and teaching awards from colleges and teachers’ associations around the country.
With photographs by Yale Joel, LIFE.com honors Hubert Alyea: an educator who made learning part magic and part mayhem for laymen and scientists alike, with a delivery that was nearly as explosive as the science itself.
Tara Thean is a freelance writer and graduate student in biological sciences at Cambridge University.
There’s a certain vibe to a state or county fair that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else. The sights, sounds and of course the smells (grass crushed by thousands of footsteps; fried dough; the indeterminate, unmistakable mingled aroma of cattle, horses, poultry and people) call to mind the slowly shortening days and cooler, thrilling nights of late summer as surely as back-to-school sales and brawls at NFL training camps.
In 1938, LIFE magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt went to Greenbrier Valley Fair in West Virginia (which three years later, in 1941, would become West Virginia’s official state fair) , and, true to form, “Eisie” came back with marvelous portraits of the fairgoers as well as wonderfully atmospheric shots of the displays, attractions and the fairgrounds themselves. But, above and beyond Eisenstaedt’s photographs, LIFE took pains to point out that in the late 1930s, even in the country’s rural bastions, “city slickers” were finding ways to entertain themselves. In fact, in the magazine’s description of the fair and its visitors, one can hear faint echoes of contemporary conversations about “authentic” versus “ironic” Americana.
The first Greenbrier Valley Fair was held just 80 years ago. The few hundred farmers who attended gaped at the wonderful Howe sewing machine and admired a stalwart yearling who grew up to become Traveller, the big gray horse who carried General Lee through the Civil War. Today, the Greenbrier Valley Fair is one of the best-known in the South. This year . . . 100,000 paid admission to the fairgrounds near Lewisburg, W. Va. They watched the trotters race and went around looking at entries in contests for the best buckwheat, the best bread, the best begonias, the best “article made of sealing wax.”
But their major preoccupation was bodies human bodies, animal bodies, bodies that looked half-human, half-animal. The “girlie” shows, which were hot and smutty, drew smaller audiences than the freaks from crowds made up of farmers, breeders and hillbillies. Only a few city people were present, although some urban sophisticates have discovered the county fair and are beginning to make America’s great harvest-time diversion a city-folk fad.
Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
America’s first televised presidential debates—four TV showdowns between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in the fall of 1960—immediately showed how they could change the course of politics.
The details of the debates have been recounted innumerable times in the subsequent decades. The stories, meanwhile, of how Nixon showed up to the very first debate looking pale and glistening with sweat beneath the glare of the studio lights, while JFK looked (literally) tanned and rested, haven’t lost any of their power simply because they’re true.
The photos here back up those stories: Nixon did look like death warmed over; Kennedy did look like a movie star. And while pundits and armchair historians like to assert that Kennedy’s media savvy won him the election while Nixon won the debates, no data exists anywhere that positively proves either point.
The fact is, both men were formidable candidates. Each had a strong grasp of the major issues facing the country—the Space Race with the Soviets; America’s role in an increasingly complex global economy; the Civil Right Movement—and each man had very little trouble articulating his and his party’s position on them. But it’s remarkable now, however, to recall that Nixon was just four years older than Kennedy. By the look of the two men in these photographs by Paul Schutzer, they might as well have been from different generations.
Presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon (right) spoke during a televised debate while opponent John F. Kennedy watches, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The candidates chatted prior to the first of their four televised debates, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Richard Nixon, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
John Kennedy and Richard Nixon stood at lecterns as moderator Howard K. Smith presided at their first debate, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Richard Nixon during the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
John F. Kennedy during the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Jackie Kennedy watched from the wings as her husband debated Richard Nixon, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Richard Nixon during the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
John F. Kennedy gripped his lectern during the debate, 1960.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
John F. Kennedy gestured during the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Richard Nixon’s hands during the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Two images made during the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The candidates here are seen as they appeared on television, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
John F. Kennedy during the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Richard Nixon during the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
John F. Kennedy during the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Richard Nixon during the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
John Kennedy and Richard Nixon after the second Kennedy-Nixon debate, 1960.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
John Kennedy and Richard Nixon after the second Kennedy-Nixon debate, 1960.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Richard Nixon at the time of the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Richard Nixon during one of the Kennedy-Nixon debates, 1960.
Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The character of “Rosie the Riveter” as feminist symbol, World War II icon and mid-century heroine is ingrained in the American psyche, a symbol of both the war effort and an historic change in the American workplace. In the early 1940s, as women flooded the labor force in order to replace the millions of men who had gone off to war, a wide variety of songwriters, illustrators like the Saturday Evening Post‘s Norman Rockwell and photographers effectively invented the archetype on which all subsequent Rosies were based.
(Pittsburgh artist J. Howard Miller’s famous 1942 “We Can Do It!” poster, created for Westinghouse House and featuring easily the most famous and recognizable “Rosie” of them all, was not widely known during the war years, and only assumed its current, iconic status decades later.)
Among the photographers who documented this massive and, in a very real sense, revolutionary influx of female workers into traditionally male factory jobs as welders, lathe operators, machinists and, of course, riveters was LIFE’s Margaret Bourke-White.
A pioneer herself (one of LIFE magazine’s original four staff photographers, America’s first accredited woman photographer during WWII, the first authorized to fly on a combat mission, etc.), Bourke-White spent time in 1943 in Gary, Indiana, chronicling “women … handling an amazing variety of jobs” in steel factories “some completely unskilled, some semiskilled and some requiring great technical knowledge, precision and facility,” as LIFE told its readers in its August 9, 1943, issue. The magazine went on to note:
In 1941 only 1% of aviation employees were women, while this year they will comprise an estimated 65% of the total. Of the 16,000,000 women now employed in the U.S., over a quarter are in war industries. Although the concept of the weaker sex sweating near blast furnaces, directing giant ladles of molten iron or pouring red-hot ingots is accepted in England and Russia, it has always been foreign to American tradition. Only the rising need for labor and the diminishing supply of manpower has forced this revolutionary adjustment.
The women are recruited from Gary and nearby East Chicago. A minority has drifted in from agricultural areas. They are black and white, Polish and Croat, Mexican and Scottish… The women steel workers at Gary are not freaks or novelties. They have been accepted by management, by the union, by the rough, iron-muscled men they work with day after day. In time of peace they may return once more to home and family, but they have proved that in time of crisis no job is too tough for American women.
Here, LIFE.com presents a series of pictures from the Gary mills in 1943. See these women, pride shining from their faces, as well as characteristically marvelous Bourke-White shots of enormous machines and grease-lathered gears that capture the grit and rugged beauty of a factory and its workers in full production mode.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk
Women laborers cleared tracks of spilled materials, Gary, Ind. 1943.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women wearing gas masks cleaned a blast furnace top at a Gary, Ind. steel mill, 1943.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women employees at Tubular Alloy Steel Corp. in Gary, Ind. predominated at pep meeting, 1943.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bernice Daunora, 31, a member of a steel mill’s “top gang” was required to wear a “one-hour, lightweight breathing apparatus” as protection against gas escaping from blast furnaces, Gary, Ind., 1943.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Theresa Arana, 21, took down temperature recordings at draw furnaces, Gary, Ind., 1943.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A stamping machine in a rail mill at Gary was operated by Florence Romanowski (right). She mechanically branded identifications into red-hot rails. Her husband was in Army
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Katherine Mrzljak, 34, a mother of two, worked with her husband at the mill.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Women welders, Gary, Ind., 1943.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Scarfing is the operation which removed surface defects from slabs to condition them for rolling. The woman at the center of the photo marked out defects with chalk for the man who was doing the scarfing (right).
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Beveling an armor plate for the tanks at Gary Works, these women operated powerful acetylene torches.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Audra Mae Hulse, 20, was a flame cutter at the American Bridge Co. in Gary. She had five relatives in the plant.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lugrash Larry, 32, a laborer in the blast furnace department, was a mother of four; her husband was also a mill worker.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lorraine Gallinger, 20, was a metallurgical observer. From North Dakota, she planned to return there after the war.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Blanche Jenkins, 39, a welder at Carnegie-Illinois, bought a $50 war bond each month. She had two children.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Flame cutting of a slab was done by a four-torch machine controlled and operated by one woman. Alice Jo Barker (above) had a husband and son who also worked in war industries.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The “pan man” at Gary Works was Rosalie Ivy; she was mixing a special mud used to seal the casting hole through which molten iron flowed from a blast furnace.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Transfer car operator Mae Harris, 23, signalled the crane man above to return the empty, hot metal ladle to the transfer car (left). The ladle contained molten iron which had poured into an open-hearth furnace. In the furnace the molten iron was added to molten scrap which, together with iron ore and fluxes, resulted in finished steel after refinement.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Dolores Macias, 26, Gary, Ind., 1943.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Victoria Brotko, 22, was a blacksmith’s helper. She took her twin brother’s job when he joined the Marines.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Ann Zarik, 22, was a flame burner in Armor Plate Division. Another image of Zarik appeared on the issue’s cover.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In the foundry of the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Co., these women worked as core-makers. A total of 18 women worked here across two shifts. The core-maker’s functions were like those of a sculptor, and the implements used were trowels, spatulas and mallets. Castings being made in this picture were for use not only at Carnegie-Illinois but at other plants.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
On an aircraft carrier deck women worked as welders and scrapers. The women alongside this steel prefabricated deck section who were without headgear and masks operated tools which scraped loose surface imperfections in preparation for welding. The welder in foreground had her name, ‘Jakie,’ written on her helmet, a popular style note among female welders.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Gary, Ind. war effort, 1943
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
LIFE magazine cover August 9, 1943
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In terms of spiritual significance, few dates compete with April 21, 1966, in the hearts of Rastafari. Celebrated by the faithful the world over as Grounation Day, it marks the visit to Jamaica by the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I, a figure worshipped as a deity by Rastafari everywhere. (Selassie was born Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael on July 23, 1892, in the Ethiopian village of Ejersa Goro; “Ras” is a noble honorific thus, Ras Tafari.)
Here, on Selassie’s birthday, LIFE presents photos from his historic 1966 trip to the Caribbean. The images capture something of the fervor and delight, as well as the barely restrained chaos, among thousands of believers upon seeing the man they considered a messiah and whom countless others still view as a power-hungry fraud.
Like photographer Lynn Pelham’s pictures, the story of Selassie’s visit never ran in the American edition of LIFE. But informal observations made by LIFE staffers who were there provide some fascinating insights into how the proceedings were viewed hint: negatively by at least some in the national press.
In notes that accompanied Pelham’s rolls of Ektachrome film to LIFE’s offices in New York just days after Selassie’s visit, for example, an editor for the magazine wrote privately to his colleagues that “the Rastafarians went wild on Selassie’s arrival. They broke police lines and swarmed around the emperor’s DC-6 [plane]. They kept touching his plane, yelling ‘God is here,’ and knocking down photographer Pelham, who got smacked. The Rastafarians fouled up the visit, as far as most Jamaicans were concerned. But Selassie seemed to love the attention these strange, wild-eyed, lawless and feared Jamaicans gave him.”
The same editor noted a few days later, when Selassie visited the Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Port-au-Prince, that “Papa Doc looked pretty much as evil as he did in 1963 when I last saw him.”
Haile Selassie died in Aug. 1975, almost a year after he was deposed in a military coup. There is no consensus, among historians or among Rastasfari, on whether he died of medical complications while under house arrest in Addis Ababa, or was assassinated.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Haile Selassie 1966
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica, 1966
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica, 1966
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica, 1966
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica, 1966
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica, 1966
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Caribbean
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Caribbean, 1966
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Jamaica
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Caribbean, 1966
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Haile Selassie in Caribbean, 1966
Lynn Pelham The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
