Curated playlist
1881 births
- Pablo PicassoPablo Picasso once stood in his occupied-Paris apartment as a German officer noticed a photograph of his painting Guernica. "Did you do that?" the officer asked. "No," Picasso replied. "You did." The exchange captures a man who turned art…
- Ludwig BinswangerLudwig Binswanger entered the world on the 13th of April 1881 in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. His father Robert Johann Binswanger was a doctor who ran the Bellevue Sanatorium. The grandfather Ludwig Elieser Binswanger founded that same…
- Béla BartókBéla Bartók died in a New York City hospital on the 26th of September 1945, and only ten people attended his funeral. For a man later ranked among Hungary's greatest composers alongside Franz Liszt, the smallness of that gathering says…
- Maja EinsteinMaja Einstein died in Princeton on the 25th of June 1951, of pneumonia following a fracture of the upper arm. She had been living in the New Jersey university town for twelve years, though she had never planned to stay. Her husband Paul…
- Vera WeizmannVera Weizmann spent forty years leading one of the world's largest Zionist women's organizations, raised two sons while practicing medicine in Manchester, and lost one of them when his plane was shot down over the Bay of Biscay. She was…
- Ludwig von MisesLudwig von Mises was born on the 29th of September 1881 in Lemberg, then the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time he died on the 10th of October 1973, he had outlasted two world…
- Kliment VoroshilovKliment Voroshilov put on his military uniform one winter morning in 1969, fully decorated with his medals, called a car, and drove himself to the hospital. He had refused, the night before, to let his family call an ambulance. That quiet…
- Jimmy WalkerJames John Walker was remembered as Jimmy Walker and nicknamed Beau James. He once said a reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat. The line captures a man who led New York City for six years with wit, charm,…
- Natalia GoncharovaNatalia Goncharova was born on the 3rd of July 1881, the same year as Picasso and Fernand Leger, in the small village of Nagaevo in what is now the Chernsky District of Tula Oblast. That coincidence of birth years was no accident of fate.…
- Padraic ColumPadraic Colum entered the world on the 8th of December 1881 inside a County Longford workhouse. His father worked there as an employee while his mother Susan Columb waited for their first child to arrive. The family grew quickly with eight…
- Alcide De GasperiAlcide De Gasperi was born on the 3rd of April 1881 in Pieve Tesino, a small town in Tyrol that had been part of Austria-Hungary for more than five centuries. He died on the 19th of August 1954, reportedly with almost no means of his own,…