The globe is a potent image, and one that may imply very various things in dif- ferent eras. Fortune has usually used the motif—fittingly, maybe, for the journal based in 1929 by Henry Luce, a globalist earlier than that time period got here into vogue. His well-known 1941 essay “The American Century” laid out an idealistic imaginative and prescient of a world period dominated by a nation solely lately free of colonialism—flawed but aspirational in its democracy, and wealthy with
the promise of a “extra considerable life,” each materially and culturally. Luce’s worldview has been mirrored on dozens of our covers, as rep- resented on this choice, curated by Fortune artistic director Josue Evilla. From the 1933 line drawing of the goddess Fortuna lovingly cradling the globe to the Bauhaus starkness of Walter Allner’s 1957 depiction of worldwide commerce to the Rubik’s Dice–like metallic globe on the 2015 cowl asserting our first Change the World record, Luce’s humane internationalism lives on.
