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Life magazine

Life is a photojournalism magazine, founded by Henry Luce in 1936 (first issue dated November 23). Originally published weekly, Life became a monthly magazine in 1971 and ceased monthly publication in 2000. It is now published frequently as a special graphic paperback book, referred to by Life as a "megazine".

As of 2004 Life was owned by AOL Time Warner. Life publication's mission was "to see life; see the world". Life has presented some of the lasting iconic images of the world's notable events. Archival issues of Life are a source of photographic history.

Table of contents
1 List of Life magazine's 10 most important events of the last millennium
2 List of Life magazine's 100 most important people of the last millennium
3 External links

List of Life magazine's 10 most important events of the last millennium

Life magazine tried to rank the top 10 events of the millennium:

  1. Bookprint (Johann Gutenberg, 1455)
  2. Discovery of New World (Christopher Columbus, 1492)
  3. A new major religion (Martin Luther, 1527)
  4. Steam engine starts industrial revolution (James Watt, 1769)
  5. Earth revolves around sun (Galileo Galilei, 1610)
  6. Germ theory of disease (Louis Pasteur, 1864; Robert Koch,1876)
  7. Gunpowder weapons (China, 1100)
  8. Declaration of independence (US, 1776)
  9. Adolf Hitler comes to power (1933)
  10. Compass goes to sea (China, 1117)

This list has been criticised for being overly focused on Western achievements. For example, the Chinese also invented a variant of book print long before Gutenberg, and until the mid 18th century the bulk of the world's printed material was Chinese.

List of Life magazine's 100 most important people of the last millennium

The list above stands in odd contrast to another, even more criticised list of the US-magazine which unexpectedly placed Edison (a US inventor) first in the "100 Most Important People in the Last 1000 Years". Predictably, this has been dubbed overblown patriotism, since even during Edison's lifetime there were non-US inventors whose inventions (combustion engine, car, electricity-making machines, etc) had greater impact than Edison's. The top 100 list was further criticised for mixing world-famous people of humankind, such as Newton and Einstein and Luther and da Vinci, with numerous Americans largely unknown outside the US:

  1. Thomas Edison
  2. Christopher Columbus
  3. Martin Luther
  4. Galileo Galilei
  5. Leonardo Da Vinci
  6. Isaac Newton
  7. Ferdinand Magellan
  8. Louis Pasteur
  9. Charles Darwin
  10. Thomas Jefferson
  11. William Shakespeare
  12. Napoleon Bonaparte
  13. Adolf Hitler
  14. Zheng He
  15. Henry Ford
  16. Sigmund Freud
  17. Richard Arkwright
  18. Karl Marx
  19. Nicolaus Copernicus
  20. Orville and Wilbur Wright
  21. Albert Einstein
  22. Mohandas Gandhi
  23. Kublai Khan
  24. James Madison
  25. Simon Bolivar
  26. Mary Wollstonecraft
  27. Guglielmo Marconi
  28. Mao Zedong
  29. Vladimir Lenin
  30. Martin Luther King Jr
  31. Alexander Graham Bell
  32. Rene Descartes
  33. Ludwig Van Beethoven
  34. Thomas Aquinas
  35. Abraham Lincoln
  36. Michelangelo
  37. Vasco Da Gama
  38. Suleyman the Magnificent
  39. Samuel F. B. Morse
  40. John Calvin
  41. Florence Nightingale
  42. Hernan Cortes
  43. Joseph Lister
  44. Ibn Battuta
  45. Zhu Xi
  46. Gregor Mendel
  47. John Locke
  48. Akbar
  49. Marco Polo
  50. Dante Alighieri
  51. John D. Rockefeller
  52. Jean Jacques Rousseau
  53. Niels Bohr
  54. Joan of Arc
  55. Frederick Douglass
  56. Louis XIV of France
  57. Nikola Tesla
  58. Immanuel Kant
  59. Fan Kuan
  60. Otto von Bismarck
  61. William the Conqueror
  62. Guido of Arezzo
  63. John Harrison
  64. Pope Innocent III
  65. Hiram Maxim
  66. Jane Addams
  67. Cao Xueqin
  68. Matteo Ricci
  69. Louis Armstrong
  70. Michael Faraday
  71. Ibn Sina
  72. Simone de Beauvoir
  73. Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi
  74. Adam Smith
  75. Marie Curie
  76. Andrea Palladio
  77. Peter the Great
  78. Pablo Picasso
  79. Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre
  80. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
  81. Phineas Taylor Barnum
  82. Edwin Hubble
  83. Susan B. Anthony
  84. Raphael
  85. Helen Keller
  86. Hokusai
  87. Theodor Herzl
  88. Elizabeth I of England
  89. Claudio Monteverdi
  90. Walt Disney
  91. Nelson Mandela
  92. Roger Bannister
  93. Leo Tolstoy
  94. John Von Neumann
  95. Santiago Ramon y Cajal
  96. Jacques Cousteau
  97. Catherine de Medici
  98. Ibn Khaldun
  99. Kwame Nkrumah
  100. Carolus Linnaeus

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External links