Curated playlist
1813 births
- Giuseppe VerdiGiuseppe Verdi was an intensely private man who liked to claim he had risen from illiterate peasants. The truth was tidier and less romantic. Both his parents came from families of small landowners and traders. His father, listed in the…
- Richard WagnerRichard Wagner was born on the 22nd of May 1813 in Leipzig, in the Jewish quarter of the city, at a house known as the House of the Red and White Lions. His father died of typhoid fever just six months after his birth. His mother then…
- John SnowJohn Snow removed a pump handle on Broad Street and changed how the world thinks about disease. The year was 1854, and cholera was killing people across London's Soho. Snow, an English physician, suspected the water rather than the air. He…
- William Smith (lexicographer)William Smith spent his spare hours as a young legal clerk teaching himself ancient Greek and Latin from scratch. By the time he walked into University College London, he had never had formal instruction in either language. He won both the…
- David Dixon PorterDavid Dixon Porter went to sea for the first time at age ten, standing watch on his father's frigate as a midshipman. By the time he died on the 13th of February, 1891, he had spent 62 years on active duty in the United States Navy, one of…
- John SedgwickJohn Sedgwick was standing in the open at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House on the 9th of May, 1864. Confederate sharpshooters, about 1,000 yards away, had begun targeting officers directing artillery. His staff was flinching.…
- George Peter Alexander HealyGeorge Peter Alexander Healy spent his days in his painting room. That is how he put it himself, in his autobiography published the year he died: "All my days are spent in my painting room." For a man who sat across from presidents, popes,…
- Søren KierkegaardSøren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on the 5th of May 1813 in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children in a family that was both prosperous and haunted. His niece Henriette Lund remembered him as a boy in "a coat the color of red cabbage",…
- Henry BessemerHenry Bessemer was born on the 19th of January 1813 in the village of Charlton, near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, into a family already fluent in the language of invention. His father, Anthony, had built machines for the Paris Mint, been…
- Otto JahnOtto Jahn was born in Kiel on the 16th of June 1813, into a world where the boundary between classical scholarship and musical biography had barely been tested. By the time he died in Göttingen on the 9th of September 1869, he had helped…
- John C. FrémontJohn Charles Frémont was born on the 21st of January 1813, the illegitimate son of a French-Canadian schoolteacher and a Virginia planter's daughter who had fled her elderly husband. He died destitute in New York City in 1890. Between…