Curated playlist
1818 births
- Don Carlos BuellDon Carlos Buell arrived at the Battle of Shiloh on the second day of April 1862 convinced that he had saved the Union cause. By the following October, his own soldiers suspected him of treason. He was a general who could organize an army…
- James Prescott JouleJames Prescott Joule was born on the 24th of December 1818, the son of a wealthy brewer, in Salford. The unit of energy that powers every calculation in modern physics, every kilowatt-hour on an electricity bill, and every equation in…
- Karl MarxOn the 14th of March 1883, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, Friedrich Engels left Karl Marx alone in his armchair for scarcely two minutes. When he returned, he found his lifelong friend peacefully gone to sleep, but forever. The…
- Irvin McDowellIrvin McDowell's name is permanently attached to one of the most humiliating afternoons in American military history. On a summer day in 1861, the Union Army he commanded streamed back toward Washington in a chaotic rout, civilians who had…
- Alexander II of RussiaAlexander II of Russia was born on the 29th of April 1818, and by the time he died he had freed more than 23 million people from bondage, sold an entire continent's worth of territory, and been blown apart by a bomb on a canal road in…
- Ivan TurgenevIvan Turgenev had a brain that weighed 2,012 grams, one of the largest ever recorded. The man who carried it was tall and broad-shouldered, yet timid, restrained, and soft-spoken. He was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet,…
- Benjamin ButlerBenjamin Butler earned two completely different reputations in the same war. The white South called him a beast and a felon worthy of execution if captured. Black newspapers, when he died in 1893, described him as "a staunch and…
- Jacob BurckhardtJacob Burckhardt once turned down the most prestigious history chair in Germany, the very seat held by his own teacher, Leopold von Ranke, at the University of Berlin, and went back to Basel instead. That choice, made in 1872, says almost…
- P. G. T. BeauregardP. G. T. Beauregard ordered the first shots of the American Civil War fired from Fort Johnson in the early hours of the 12th of April 1861. A 34-hour bombardment followed, and when the smoke cleared over Charleston Harbor, the general who…
- Nathaniel LyonNathaniel Lyon died on the 10th of August, 1861, shot through the heart at about 9:30 in the morning on a Missouri hillside. He was the first Union general killed in the American Civil War. At the moment he fell, his forces numbered…