Reply #148: It may well be a good topic for an entire forum.

[SheilaT]

I can carry on for hours about what I learned from reading old Life Magazine. What I got from the ads was at least as good as what I got from the articles. I'll just toss out this one nugget: it's easy, in hindsight, to see that the Civil Rights movement was going to occur, because among the things you learn is that African Americans (at that point often the children or grandchildren of freed slaves) because of the war can now for the first time ever get jobs that pay a decent wage. Any thoughtful person ought to have figured out that there would be no going back.

If our PhD friend is on DU, maybe she could PM me. I would love to talk with her about the topic.

Here's another thing: I was born in 1948, so I'm a Boomer. Until the outbreak of WWII, the world I was reading about was a foreign country. All of a sudden it became the world I knew. So it would be very interesting to see how someone who is now 40, or no 20, would react. How long would it take for the world in the magazine to become a familiar one?