In early 1944 Ann Clare Brokaw, the daughter of Clare Boothe Luce, was killed in a car accident. The loss of her only child devastated Clare Boothe Luce, who was then finishing up her first term in the United States House of Representatives. Although she managed to win reelection, the trauma persisted. Searching for solace,…

Henry Robinson Luce was born one-hundred-and-twenty years ago, on April 3, 1898, in China to American Presbyterian missionaries. Apart from a visit to the United States in 1906, young Henry spent his first fourteen years living in China, a time of momentous upheavals. While attending Chefoo, a British preparatory school in northern China, the 1911…

How can propaganda be recognized and how can it be countered? These questions were increasingly being asked in the United States throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. The Springfield Republican, the Massachusetts newspaper where Henry R. Luce received his first real world experience in journalism outside of school, wrote in an 1937 editorial “We are…

In 1942 Clare Boothe Luce was elected as a Republican representative from Connecticut, entering the 78th United States Congress where women made up less than two percent of its membership. Already famous, her arrival in Washington attracted additional notice; local hairdressers took advantage of her popularity by advertising “the Clarette” and “the Clare Bo” styles. Tourists taking in the…

In December 1934, at a ball thrown in honor of the Broadway musical “Anything Goes,” Henry Luce was struck by what he called a “coup de foudre” (love at first sight). The object of his affection was Clare Boothe, a wealthy divorcée born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1903. The two had met twice before…

In mid-December 1952, a plane from the United States Embassy in Singapore landed in Saigon, Vietnam. The passenger aboard was Henry R. Luce, head of Time Inc., who was there to see what was increasingly becoming another front in an expanding war against Communism. Luce spent a couple of days in Vietnam, visiting both the north…

The 1960 presidential election presented a quandary for Henry R. Luce, head of Time Inc., the largest publishing business in the world. A Republican whose aid had previously propelled Wendell Willkie and Dwight D. Eisenhower to the Republican nomination, he now had to choose between Richard Nixon and a man he admired but who stood for the…

Through March, the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at the New-York Historical Society is displaying a number of documents reflecting the long history of African Americans in North America. These complement a particularly important new acquisition, an original letter from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to publisher Henry Luce, that came to N-YHS as part of the recent…