Page 60 – LIFE

‘A Country Within a Country’: Inside the Navajo Nation, 1948

November 19, 2020November 24, 2017 by

As LIFE described the situation to readers in 1948, the Navajo Nation was “a country within a country” a reminder that Native American history courses inextricably alongside everything else that falls under the umbrella of American history.

When photographer Leonard McCombe visited Navajo country in Arizona to create the images in this story, however, he caught a people at a very specific and important point in that long and ongoing history. The Navajo Nation, which comprised about 61,000 members at the time and was the fastest-growing Native American group in the nation, was at a moment of crisis.

By that point in 1948, the land on which the Navajos lived could no longer support them and Americans were hearing reports of starvation on the reservation. However, as LIFE noted, simply sending food wouldn’t solve the problem.

The story focused on the extended Yellowsalt family, most of whom made their living by herding sheep. The family couldn’t get permission from reservation administrators—who pointed to the disappearing grass in the area—to expand the flock. By the government’s calculations, according to LIFE, the land could only support enough sheep for about 20% of the families to own enough of the animals to make a sustainable living. Meanwhile, exposure to white populations had introduced devastating diseases into the Navajo community, and government-run hospitals didn’t have enough beds to support the population.

The central questions posed by the story were inescapable: “How can technical knowledge be made available to people without destroying the fabric of their lives? How can nations which differ from each other in appearance and language and culture live peaceably together?”

“Overall, I was surprised at the general accuracy of the piece,” said David E. Wilkins, a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and an author of The Navajo Political Experience, considering the date and the audience for which it was written. “It was full of the assimilation language that was dominant at the time, but that wasn’t surprising.”

Wilkins has some quibbles with the story. For example, LIFE published images of bare-breasted Navajo women that strike him as strange, as he says he’s not aware of a ceremony in which Navajo women would usually go unadorned. But the big thing that’s missing, he says, is a sense of the larger context in which the Yellowsalt family was living. LIFE hints at the reasons why there aren’t enough sheep for the family to prosper, noting that when the people returned to land they had been forced from in the late 1800s, it was now a reservation “hemmed in by land-hungry whites,” and that grazing flocks on that fenced-in space destroyed the range. “As the Navajo nation grew,” LIFE noted, “the land, the basis of its existence, began to fail.” But as Wilkins points out, it was a federal livestock-reduction program in the 1930s not the natural course of things that had mandated they cut back on grazing animals on that land.

“In 1948, the Navajo Nation was still reeling from the livestock-reduction program,” he says. “It devastated the Navajos economically, psychically and culturally.”

The coming of World War II staved off economic disaster for a little while; Wilkins says that more than 15,000 Navajos were employed in some fashion as a result of the war. But in 1948 the consequences could no longer be denied. “The war’s over and they go back to the reservation and there’s nothing there because of wrong-headed policy makers who thought they were doing the right thing,” he explains. Though those policy-makers thought they saving the land from overgrazing, Wilkins says that in fact later research shows that the Navajo livestock were not a primary cause of the problems. In addition, though federal policy affected every aspect of Navajo life, it was only later in 1948 that the Arizona Supreme Court declared that the state’s Navajo citizens had the right to vote.

The best thing about this article, Wilkins said, is what happened after it was published.

Media attention paid to the crisis among the Navajo People, with popular journalistic reports such as this one, contributed to Congress passing the Navajo-Hopi Long Range Rehabilitation Act, which “helped to save those two peoples from the economically crippled situation they were in.” That, perhaps, is part of the answer to that question: How can two very different nations live peaceably together?

Seated close to the evening fire, old man Gray Mountain, 91, told his small grandchildren legends about the early days of the Navajo people.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A Navajo family living on a reservation.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Toward sunddown the Yellowsalts finished up their outdoor chores and start the fire for their evening meal. In the background is Navajo Mountain.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Yellowsalt’s son had his hair brushed by his wife.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A Navajo woman smoked a hand-rolled cigarette.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A Navajo young man.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

This Navajo woman sported Navajo-crafted silver shirt collar caps, beaded earrings, and a beaded necklace complete with silver quarters and 50 cent pieces strung together like a tie.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Baking bread, a woman knelt by the fire while a loaf cooked on a crude metal grill.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A Navajo girl hugged her dog while she watched the sheep on the high plateau.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

The game of marbles, was explained by the boy at center to his brother and sister. This boy, who went to school, learned the game there.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A Navajo traded at the store on the reservation.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Navajo children received religious instruction.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Navajo children napped on the tables and the floor.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Navajo girls swept the sidewalk.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A young Navajo girl read a Raggedy Ann book.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Navajo schoolchildren got a lesson in nose-blowing from a white teacher.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Thousands of People Became American Citizens on the First Official Veterans Day

November 2, 2020November 10, 2017 by

Veterans Day, which falls each year on November 11, is a time for Americans to remember the sacrifices made by those who served in the U.S. military. But the first Veterans Day—dedicated to veterans of all wars—also happened to honor a different group of Americans.

On Veterans Day in 1954, one month after President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued the first Veterans Day proclamation and the new holiday officially replaced Armistice Day, a whopping 50,000 men and women from coast to coast were sworn in as new U.S. citizens in what LIFE magazine called “the first time in U.S. history that citizenship was conferred upon so many people in so many mass ceremonies.”

A photo in the Nov. 22, 1954, issue showed three Japanese people getting sworn in on the battleship U.S.S. Missouri in Bremerton, Wash., on the same deck on which the Japanese signed their surrender on Sept. 2, 1945, ending World War II. But many more photos from that day exist in LIFE’s archives, and they provide a unique look at that historic day.

At a ceremony at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field where 1,600 men and women took the oath of citizenship, U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. acknowledged the renewed significance of the ceremony’s overlap on Veterans Day.

“November 11th is a hallowed day for all Americans,” he said, “And it continues as a day dedicated to memory of the past and hope for the future hope that all men can learn to live together in peace as we have done in this American melting pot of the world.”

He also emphasized that swearing allegiance as a U.S. citizen was more important than ever in 1954, with the Cold War in full swing. In fact, the Cold War had changed the character of the country’s most famous immigration station, Ellis Island, which was put to use in the ’50s to implement a post-WWII policy that banned people who had been affiliated with a totalitarian party.

But as Brownell said in his speech, Ellis Island had been is disuse as an immigrant station, with only a few hundred detained there in recent months, compared to the 1.2 million that Ellis Island had processed in 1907. Immigration services in New York would be moved to a different building, off the island, on Nov. 12, 1954. The day after this historic Veterans Day, Ellis Island closed as an immigration center.

“The island buildings, I feel sure, can be put to useful service in other work,” Brownell said.

In the decades that followed, the immigration center would be reopened as a museum—one that, all these years later, sees even more visitors each year than the number who came through Ellis Island annually at the height of immigration.

Original caption: “In mass induction of 9,000 new citizens, men and women at New York’s Polo Grounds raise their right hands to take oath of allegiance.”

Lisa Larsen / The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mass induction of new citizens in New York on Veterans Day, 1954.

Lisa Larsen / The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

How a Photographer Illuminated the Plight of the ‘Invisible Poor’

December 28, 2020October 26, 2017 by

They came to Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1968, by the thousand young and old, black and white, traveling in buses and cars and mule trains. Some had left homes in the rural South. Others came from cities like Memphis, Chicago and Los Angeles. Most were African Americans, but Latinos, white, and members of half a dozen Native American nations were on hand as well. Virtually all of them were poor. Although Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had summoned them to the nation’s capital, the movement belonged to them. This was the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC).

They were often called “the invisible poor.” But they came to Washington determined to be seen and heard by their government and by the nation as a whole. They had answered King’s call because they shared his conviction that the nation’s progress toward racial equality and economic justice had stalled. Indeed, King believed that the nation was in crisis. He pointed to signs that couldn’t be missed millions of citizens of the world’s richest nation living in grinding poverty; violent eruptions of rage and frustration in black inner cities; an immoral war in Southeast Asia that siphoned away resources from anti-poverty programs at home while spreading suffering and death abroad. During the December 1967 press conference at which the SCLC launched the PPC, King told reporters that America was in the grips of “a kind of social insanity.”

King was convinced that a renewed campaign of civil disobedience in his words, “a new kind of Selma or Birmingham” would recalibrate America’s moral compass and force the government to address the needs of the poor. He felt that the campaign’s demands for jobs for every able-bodied worker and for a decent income for the elderly and infirm would receive “a sympathetic understanding across the nation.” King pledged to “lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington.” Once there, what he called “militant nonviolent actions,” such as marches and sit-ins, would “dramatize the economic plight of the Negro, and compel the government to act.”

In New York City, Jill Freedman heard King’s call and she answered. Like King, she sensed that America faced an existential crisis. In a recent interview, she told me that his assassination in April 1968, only weeks before the PPC was scheduled to arrive in Washington, left her devastated and searching for a way to respond. A chance encounter with a campaign organizer in Central Park seemed to supply the answer. Still in her 20s, she quit her job as a copywriter for an advertising agency and left for the nation’s capital with hundreds of others, in what she describes as a “long covered Greyhound wagon train.” Her camera was in her hand. Freedman’s 2017 new book, Resurrection City, 1968, showcase the photographs that she made as a participant in the PPC.

Freedman was far from being a professional photographer. At the time, she was little more than an enthusiastic amateur with a darkroom. She was in love with the art and craft of photography, however, and was especially drawn to the way the photo-essays she saw in LIFE magazine, by photographers such as of W. Eugene Smith, told stories about the quiet heroism of ordinary people. She felt that photographs like Smith’s introduced viewers to people and events and to truths that they might never have otherwise imagined. Photography like this had the potential to change the world, at least in some small way, and Freedman wanted to play her part. By joining the PPC, she committed herself to documenting the campaign that King had called into being.

Resurrection City, the PPC’s plywood and canvas city-within-a-city that took shape on the Mall in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, became the visible symbol of the PPC. For the six weeks of its existence, in May and June 1968, it was also Freedman’s home. The encampment was a magnet for photographers. Scores came and went, and some made compelling photographs. But of those photographers only Freedman lived in the city, from beginning to end, and her pictures stand out from all the others.

Most of the photographers who visited camp were looking for kind of dramatic images that readers of newspapers and magazines had come to expect from civil rights campaigns. Clichés were easy to find daily marches to government buildings; periodic confrontations with the police; charismatic leaders, such as a young Jesse Jackson. Visits by Sidney Poitier and other celebrities, and concerts by the likes of jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, also provided photographers occasions for making photographs that instantly caught the eye.

Freedman sometimes photographed scenes like these. It was important, after all, to document the protests and the police. But those aren’t the photographs at the heart of either the exhibition or the book. Avoiding most of the easy drama and all of the celebrities, she offers instead portraits of ordinary people the women, men and children who were the unheralded heroes of the movement. Freedman’s people are the ones with the muddiest shoes and wettest clothes, the people with the most to gain and most to lose. Her refusal to concentrate on protests and charismatic leaders challenges her viewers. She asks her audience to see the dignity and humanity amid the grime, the anger, and the rain.

Freedman’s photographs of Resurrection City first appeared in the June 28, 1968, issue of LIFE as part of a photo-essay on the PPC (see below). The photographs, five by Freedman and seven by members of the magazine’s staff, focused on the daily lives of the camp’s residents children play, teenagers flirt, an elderly woman plays a guitar, everyone struggles through the mud. An article by staff writer John Neary that accompanied the photo-essay contained some of the most insightful reporting on Resurrection City to appear anywhere. He knew that the women and men who made up the PPC simply wanted their share of the American dream “dignity, a future, a chance for their kids, a modicum of happiness.” He understood knew that the campaigners were in Washington to assert their rights, not to plead for them. They had come to the capital and built their city in order to “demand an end to poverty and violence, to demand a meaningful job for every employable person, and end to hunger and malnutrition that scarred their lives.” Neary admitted that he didn’t know what would become of the people of Resurrection City and their campaign, but he was sure that they intended “never to be invisible again.”

It is now nearly half a century since Freedman made her photographs of the PPC. That may not be forever, but it’s long enough to suggest that her images of the no-longer-invisible poor have become an indelible part of the nation’s historical record.

John Edwin Mason teaches African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia. He is writing a book on the photographer, writer, and filmmaker Gordon Parks. This piece is adapted from “Seeing Resurrection City, Seeing the Poor,” Mason’s introduction to Freedman’s new book, Resurrection City, 1968.

Resurrection City, Washington D.C., 1968.

Jill Freedman, courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery

Resurrection City, Poor Peoples Campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968.

Jill Freedman, courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery

From the June 28, 1968 issue of LIFE magazine.

Page 22 photo by Rowland Scherman. Page 23 photos by Jill Freedman (top) and Leonard McCombe (bottom).

From the June 28, 1968 issue of LIFE magazine.

Page 24 photos by Rowland Sherman (top), Jill Freedman (bottom). Page 25 photos by Jill Freedman (center), Leonard McCombe (right, 2).

From the June 28, 1968 issue of LIFE magazine.

Page 26/27 photo by Rowland Scherman. Page 27 photo by Jill Freedman (top and bottom right), Rowland Scherman (center).

From the June 28, 1968 issue of LIFE magazine.

Page 28 photo by Rowland Scherman. Page 29 photo by Charles Phillips.

Days of Wonder: America Reacts to the Launch of Sputnik, 1957

January 15, 2020October 4, 2017 by

When Sputnik 1 launched on Oct. 4, 1957 LIFE Magazine’s audience had to get used to a new reality. In a very literal sense, there was a “dazzling new sight in the heavens,” as the magazine put it, and a Soviet device passed overhead several times a day. Figuratively, things were different too. The world had entered a new age of space exploration and, much to the shock of many in the U.S., it did not begin with American glory.

In an Oct. 21 cover package about the satellite, LIFE looked at the situation from a variety of angles.

An essay from guided-missile expert C.C. Furnas took the U.S. to task for not being the first to launch a satellite, arguing that the feat would have been entirely feasible if the nation had simply buckled down. “All too frequently it has been the view of our defense establishment that research not directly related to the development of military hardware is entitled to only secondary consideration,” he wrote. “It has been regarded as a sort of extracurricular scientific pastime to be indulged in only if money is left over from the ‘really important’ things.” Such an outlook was shortsighted, he explained, especially since many of the century’s most significant military advances had been the accidental result of scientific discovery, not the other way around.

Meanwhile, in the political world, President Eisenhower attempted to reassure Americans by promising that a U.S. satellite would launch, and that it would be even better than Sputnik. And culturally, though afraid of what the news could mean for the Cold War, many Americans showed their Sputnik spunk by embracing satellite-inspired cocktails, toys and clothing, all while looking ahead to the next step in the space race.

It was this can-do attitude, more than anything, that the magazine attempted to summon in an editorial on the subject.

“Sputnik should remind us of what we ourselves have proved many times from Lexington to the Manhattan Project: that any great human accomplishment demands a consecration of will and a concentration of effort,” the magazine proclaimed. “This is as true of the liberation of men and nations as it is of the conquest of space.”

Smithsonian Institution scientists Dr. Josef A. Hynek, Fred L. Whipple and Don Lautman plotted the orbit of Sputnik I.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From the Oct. 21, 1957 LIFE magazine cover story.

This globe was built to trace orbit of Sputnik I.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From the Oct. 21, 1957 LIFE magazine cover story.

Using a tracking satellite in a van, scientists from California Institute of Technology measured its radio signal. Silhouetted at the right was a table set up on boxes to hold the men’s supper.

Bill Bridges The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

With fresh data to analyze, scientists at the Minitrack station near Washington let their coffee grow cold.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This camera was assembled in California to track Sputnik.

Richard Hartt The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Scientists working at the field lab of the National Bureau of Standards took measurements of Sputnik I signals.

Carl Iwasaki The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Scientists of the National Bureau of Standards Boulder Laboratory listened to signals from Sputnik I.

Carl Iwasaki The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Scientists of the National Bureau of Standards Boulder Laboratory received signals from Sputnik I.

Carl Iwasaki The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

From the Oct. 21, 1957 LIFE magazine cover story.

LIFE Magazine

Space fashions rushed onto the market in 1957 included skirts, jackets, hats, and balloons with a satellite motif.

Peter Stackpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Macy’s department store filled the shelves with space toys.

Ted Russell The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Space toys displayed by costumed employees of Macy’s in New York included suits, guns, and balloons.

Ted Russell The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A young woman ate a Sputnik sundae.

Don Cravens The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Dr. Sig Hansen wore a 50-pound aluminum and steel space suit in 1957. This room, built by the Air Force and Litton Industries of Beverly Hills, Calif., was a sealed chamber from which virtually all air was pumped out to achieve a vacuum like that encountered in space. During the test, Hansen worked with a radio tube which operated even though the usual vacuum-containing glass shell had been left off, thus permitting easy experimentation with its internal design. At the moment the picture was taken, the chamber was the equivalent of 95.5 miles altitude, the highest vacuum in which a man had yet lived.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Before Little Rock: Mob Violence Over Desegregation in Clinton, Tennessee, 1956

December 10, 2019September 1, 2017 by

The most famous photographs resulting from the conflict over school integration would be taken the following year in Little Rock, Ark., but in 1956 school integration was, as LIFE put it in a story that September, already “the greatest unresolved national issue.” The Supreme Court had ruled on the matter in Brown v. Board of Education two years before, but the implementation of that order was still being met with violence in places like Clinton, Tenn., as seen in the photos here taken by Howard Sochurek and Robert W. Kelley.

LIFE reported that the desegregation process in Clinton (a town that had been involved in court battles on the subject for years) had seemed to be moving relatively peacefully until a white supremacist named John Kasper came to town from New Jersey. He helped instigate citizens to rebel against the law that required the town’s white high school to serve citizens of all races starting in the new fall term that year. Though Kasper was sentenced to a year in jail by a federal judge in Knoxville, his influence had already contributed to mob violence that peaked that Labor Day weekend.

The situation in Clinton was bad enough that town leaders asked for state help. The governor called in the state police and the National Guard to help a local band of newly recruited deputies make sure the order for integration was followed. Even though many of the officials involved had previously acted to support segregation, they recognized that this law had to be obeyed.

The week of violence ended with a dozen African-American high-schoolers in class at the integrated high school. Though problems in the area would continue for months and de facto school segregation remains a serious problem in many places in the United States today, that September the presence of those 12 students was a victory.

“In spite of agitation, in spite of zealots and the misgivings of the majority, the pattern was changing,” LIFE noted. “This fall 45,000 Negro students were free to attend integrated schools for the first time. It was a slow, small, painful change but it began to look inevitable.”

A line of National Guardsmen faced off against a night crowd on Clinton’s Main Street.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A mob rocked African-Americans in an out-of-state car passing through Clinton. For four hours the town police stood by helpless as cars were dented and windows smashed. A policeman persuaded part of the mob to attack only Tennessee cars.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A group of teenage boys with signs on their car protesting school integration in Clinton, Tenn.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A crowd attacked cars driven by African Americans to protest integration in the schools in Clinton, Tenn.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The National Guard was on the streets during race riots in Clinton, Tenn.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Deputies threw tear gas bombs and the mob broke up briefly but then regrouped, until state police quelled them.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The national Guard on the streets, Cinton, Tenn., 1956.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fourteen-year-old student Ronald Hayden held his school books outside his home in Clinton, Tenn.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A scene from the African-American section of Clinton, Tenn., with some of the youths who would be going to Clinton High School.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Students Robert Thacker (left) and Minnie Ann Dickey relaxed in the African-American section of town in Clinton, Tenn.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Major General Joseph Henry Jr. led the two Guard battalions.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pro-segregation agitator John Kasper, center, being led off in handcuffs..

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

White rioters stood around during the demonstrations regarding school integration in Clinton, Tenn.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The National Guard patted down prisoners in Clinton, Tenn., 1956.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The National Guard brought M-41 tanks to Clinton.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Heading to school after the National Guard had moved into town and begun patrolling, ten of Clinton High’s 12 African-American students started the half-mile walk. Previously they had had to ride 16 miles to a segregated school in Knoxville. Clinton’s principal told this group, “You have all shown great courage.”

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

National Guardsmen escorted African-American teens through the front door of school, while white students watched on in Clinton, Tenn.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A scene from inside Clinton High School on the first day of integration.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

“The Halting And Fitful Battle For Integration.” From the Sep. 17, 1956 issue of LIFE magazine.

“The Halting And Fitful Battle For Integration.” From the Sep. 17, 1956 issue of LIFE magazine.

LIFE Magazine

“The Halting And Fitful Battle For Integration.” From the Sep. 17, 1956 issue of LIFE magazine.

Twenty-five Delightful Pictures of Cats

July 8, 2020August 8, 2017 by

In addition to the cats, these photos feature some familiar, feline-friendly humans: There’s a 1959 photo of Ernest Hemingway, who collected six-toed cats, with a cat helping itself to a glass of water. (Hemingway’s cats may have drunk more than water, with one letter suggesting the author fed one named “Friendless” whisky and milk when Hem was feeling lonely and wanted to drink with somebody.) And there’s Fred Astaire palling around in 1962 with the Siamese cat that fellow film star Kim Novak, also pictured, had given him. “Animals loved Daddy,” Astaire’s daughter Ava later told Vanity Fair‘s editor-at-large, Sarah Giles.

But it’s also clear that a cat can be a star, whether or not its owner is famous. For example, in 1958, Navy doctor Dietrich Beischer used magnet boots to train a kitten to chase a mouse upside-down—to get a sense of how humans would deal with weightlessness. Thus, the cat played an important role in the history of space travel. And as for a cat in a funny hat or a cat eating corn on the cob well, some things never change.

Here’s a look at 25 of the best feline photos in LIFE’s iconic archive of 20th century photography.

A kitten emerged from pot of milk after falling into it, 1940.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Aspiring ballerina Edwina Seaver relaxed on the sofa at home with Siamese cat Ting Ling, 1940.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A cat nestled in a carrier during an air raid, 1941.

John Phillips The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Portrait of Blackie, LIFE photographer Gjon Mili’s cat, 1943.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A husky Persian cat posed with his ribbons and trophy at the Atlantic City Cat Show, 1945.

Jerry Cooke The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Rudy the Dachshund and Trudy the cat engaged in hide and seek or ‘pounce on the dog” in prelude to a friendly roughhousing wrestling match between the pet housemates. 1946.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Baby, the seeing-eye cat, 1947.

Loran F. Smith The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Cat on wheels, 1948.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A cat named Monkey had a large hat collection, circa 1948/1949.

James Whitmore The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Nipper, the corn loving cat, 1951.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Russian-born American operatic mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel sang as a cat named Blackie sat on a piano, 1952.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sharon Adams, 10, played in a snow drift as her cat maintained its comfortable perch atop her head, 1952.

A. Y. Owen The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Dutch billiards prodigy Renske Quax fed cream to his cat, 1953.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fresh milk at Arch Badertscher’s dairy farm. 1954.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Pets of the Lyng family: Mitten the cat, Tosen the dog and an unnamed mouse, 1955.

Jytte Bjerregaard Muller The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Composer Alan Hovhaness worked in a score-littered studio while a black cat nestled among the papers on the piano, 1955.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Kim Novak played with Siamese cats that were used in one of her movies, “Bell, Book and Candle,” 1958.

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Naval researcher Dr. Dietrich Beischer tested effects of being upside-down for prolonged periods of time on a cat and mouse, 1958.

Grey Villet The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ernest Hemingway sat while a cat drank out of a water glass on the table, 1959.

Tore Johnson The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Otto Preminger looked at stray cats while attending the Venice Film Festival, at which his film “Anatomy of a Murder” was shown, 1959.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Black cats and their owners lined up for an audition for the movie “Tales of Terror,” 1961.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ordinary striped tabby cats waited on a beach as a man went into the water to catch fish, 1962.

Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fred Astaire danced with his Siamese cat on his shoulder, 1962.

John Swope The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

The manipulation of light created emotive and visual effects, 1963.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Poet Rod McKuen played a record on his stereo set while a pet Siamese cat nuzzled his face affectionately, 1967.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Before Little Rock: Mob Violence Over Desegregation in Clinton, Tennessee, 1956

Twenty-five Delightful Pictures of Cats

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