Photo Essays
Fighting Teen Pregnancy: Portrait of a Radical High School Program, 1971
A new report from the National Center for Health Statistics indicates that the rates of teen pregnancies across the United States — and especially births among...
Mile-Wide Tornado Flattens Oklahoma City Suburb
Violent winds destroyed homes, businesses and schools in Moore, Oklahoma, on Monday, leaving its residents reeling.
LIFE Behind the Picture: Little Leaguers Demand Their Pants, 1954
While its primacy as the national pastime has occasionally been challenged over the years — by football, by basketball and, increasingly, by NASCAR — every...
The Science Teacher You Wish You Had
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...
Vlad the (Insect) Impaler: LIFE With Nabokov and His Beloved Butterflies
On anyone’s list of the 20th century’s greatest writers never to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov will likely appear at, or very...
Ella and Friends: Color Portraits of the First Lady of Song and Other Jazz Legends
In a January 1955 article titled “New Life for U.S. Jazz,” LIFE magazine noted that the genre’s popularity was growing faster than almost any other form of music...
After Newtown, School Shooter Training for Teachers
As schools across the country review their lockdown procedures, more than 100 teachers and administrators in Alabama took crisis-management preparation a step...
LIFE With Guns: ‘Drawing a Bead on Safety,’ 1956
[NOTE: LIFE.com is aware that encountering images of guns and children in a classroom might be distressing to some readers — even if those images were made...
The 17 Worst Mascots of March Madness
Mascots are supposed to bring luck and rouse competitive energy for the team that they represent—usually, they range from ferocious animals to warriors who...
Brave Hearts: Remembering the Little Rock Nine, 1957
Beyond religion, beyond class, beyond politics and ideology, for centuries race been the single most contentious, corrosive question in America’s dialog with...
LIFE With Jack Nicholson: Early Photos of an Actor on the Brink
As difficult as it might be to fathom today — when the man known to all the world as “Jack” has journeyed from respected actor to movie star to superstar to...
Paying Kids for Good Grades: Does It Work?
Two schools in Washington DC participate in a four-city experiment to see if cash can truly make a difference in the classroom
Behind the Picture: ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’
Triumph. That’s the look on President Harry Truman’s face. Sheer, unadulterated triumph. In fact, of the countless politics-related photographs made over, say,...
LIFE With Dem Bums: Spring Training at Dodgertown, 1948
With the exception of that team from the Bronx and, perhaps, the Red Sox, no baseball franchise in history is as storied as the Dodgers — especially the...
‘Game of the Century’: Notre Dame vs. Michigan State, 1966
One of the most storied programs in college football history, Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish have won 11 national titles over the past nine decades — four of them...
LIFE Inside a ‘Genius School,’ 1948
The phrase “genius school” has been tossed around quite a bit over the past year or so, after Cornell University won an international contest to create a...
Dustin Hoffman: Early Photos of an Actor on the Rise
If they stick around long enough, great actors — or great American actors, anyway — often seem to go through similar, predictable stages in their careers...
Raid on a Polygamist Town: Arizona, 1953
Just before dawn on July 26, 1953, Arizona law enforcement launched what has since become known as the Short Creek raid: the arrest of men and women in an...
Italian Earthquake Tragedy
A elementary school collapses killing 26 children and a teacher
Africa Under Water
Torrential rains and floods have swept over East and West Africa in recent weeks, destroying homes and schools and washing away crops and livestock. Aid agencies...
