I chose to review the popular magazine Time, with this specific volume dating back to 1936. Over seventy years later, it is obvious that things have changed in society. The most notable indicator of this would be prices. You could buy a Plymouth for as little as $510 dollars. I find this scary, because I hate imagining the differences in current prices to those when I am seventy years old. You could also get a yearly subscription to Time for $5. There are also a lot of cigarette ads without any warning labels, which shows that tobacco was very popular, and most people were unaware of the negative effects. People today would go crazy if they only had to pay 15 cents for a pack of 20 cigarettes.
At this time, the telephone was still in its early stages, with the Bell Telephone System, dominating the market. This is likely names after Alexander Graham Bell, the noted inventor of the telephone. There were a lot of pages dedicated to foreign affairs and war, which I thought was interesting since this is a few years before the start of World War 2. I noticed one insert about France, saying they had a national surplus of wine and oysters, so their daily half pint of wine got upped to a full pint, along with added oysters. I thought this was very random, and wonder if the French Army is still served that much wine today.
There were numerous articles with cruise ships, which I thought was interesting since this was 20 years after the sinking of the Titanic. I thought this was interesting since the United States was technically still involved in the Great Depression. With that being said, the financial section of the magazine wasn’t noticeably long, which makes me wonder if the people were tired of hearing about the economy, and maybe things were starting to look up.
One of the more humorous ads included an ad for Saraka, a natural laxative. The selling point they used was that it would help keep you in shape, since constipation would no longer get in your way. My favorite ad was an ad for a tanning machine, which looks like a computer sized box projecting UV rays at the person being tanned. I found this interesting because I did not know that at this time people had the desire to be tan, like many people are today. The company would also send it to you for free, where you could use it for 7 days. If you liked it, then you could keep it and pay for it. I do not know of many companies today sending things to people for free, initially.
In the science section, I found one article about a man who housed multiple colonies of chimpanzees, who at one point stayed in a penthouse. As far as scientists, there were multiple incidents of scientists dying because of exposure to a disease or bacteria they were working with. There was also a vaccine to prevent against infantile paralysis, which I had never heard of. This vaccine was under scrutiny because some children that received the vaccine soon contracted the disease.
In the “Letters” section, I found it interesting to see from one reader that they are removing their subscription because “they despise Republicanism”. If this is true, it tends to contrast the majority of magazines today, as they are mostly supporting Democratic views. In one section about other countries, I found it humorous when it was said that “confusion and contradiction was the reaction throughout Great Britain, where portions of the President’s words could not have been spoken in all of Ethiopia’s five languages at once.” It seems that sarcasm and bluntness played a bigger role in magazines at this time.
In Germany, the government had recently decided to declare no wedding ring can be sold of a quality purer than 8 carat gold. Also in Germany, Adolf Hitler had recently barred from German radio all broadcasts with advertising. It pointed out that he owns a newspaper company, and needed revenue from advertising in the newspapers. In addition, subscribers would have an identification booklet they were always told to carry, which was said to “give the holder a comfortable feeling of being quite safe in Germany.” I found this chilling, since I know that shortly after things were not that way.
While Time didn’t have too many bizarre incidents, there were advertisements that could be used to describe the daily life of a person at this time, as well as news articles that showed how foreign affairs were right before World War 2. I think a lot can be learned about American society at this time, and I would find it very interesting to look at other magazines and other dates to uncover some of the history we tend to forget about on a daily basis.
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