Curated playlist
1882 births
- Franklin D. RooseveltFranklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency four times, the only person in American history to serve more than two terms. He took office on the 4th of March 1933, when a quarter of the workforce had no job and 32 of the 48 states had shut…
- Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse on the 28th of March 1941, her pockets weighted with stones. She had just finished her last novel, Between the Acts, and the Second World War had destroyed both her London homes. But what drew her…
- James JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on the 2nd of February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, and died 58 years later in Zurich after surgery for a perforated ulcer. Between those two dates he produced a body of work so…
- Igor StravinskyIgor Stravinsky once received a score back from his mentor in the mail, returned with a note reading: "Not delivered on account of death of addressee." That mentor was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the most powerful figure in Russian music, and…
- Sharda MehtaSharda Mehta received her Bachelor of Arts in Logic and Moral Philosophy from Gujarat College in 1901. That degree made her one of the first two women to hold a university qualification in what is now Gujarat. Behind that achievement stood…
- A. A. MilneA. A. Milne taught himself to read at the age of two. That detail feels right for a man who would spend his life in thrall to words, though the books that made him famous were not the ones he cared most about writing. Alan Alexander Milne…
- Ion AntonescuIon Antonescu was executed by a military firing squad on the 1st of June 1946, at a site outside Jilava called Valea Piersicilor, the Valley of the Peach Trees. He refused a blindfold. When the order came, he raised his hat in salute. His…
- Lynn ThorndikeLynn Thorndike coined a phrase that historians still use every day, and he did it almost in passing. In A Short History of Civilization, published in 1926, he became the first historian to propose the term "early modern" for the stretch of…
- Jean GiraudouxJean Giraudoux died in Paris on the 31st of January 1944, at the age of 61, under circumstances that have never been fully explained. There has been speculation that he was poisoned. He is buried in the Cimetière de Passy. For a man whose…
- Mohammad MosaddeghMohammad Mosaddegh, born on the 16th of June 1882, became the most popular politician in Iran's modern history by doing something no Iranian leader had dared before: he seized the oil fields. In 1951, as prime minister, he nationalised the…
- Herbert Bayard SwopeHerbert Bayard Swope entered the world on the 5th of January 1882, in St. Louis, Missouri. His parents were German immigrants named Ida Cohn and Isaac Swope. Isaac worked as a watchcase maker while raising four children. Herbert was the…
- Max BornMax Born shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for work he had completed nearly three decades earlier. The delay was not an oversight. It was a slow reckoning with just how much he had changed the way science thought about reality. Born…
- James F. ByrnesJames Francis Byrnes was born on the 2nd of May, 1882, at 538 King Street in Charleston, South Carolina, into a household shaped by loss before it had truly begun. His father died shortly after he was born. His mother, Elizabeth McSweeney…
- Arthur EddingtonArthur Stanley Eddington stood at the center of one of the most dramatic moments in twentieth-century science. On the 29th of May 1919, during a total solar eclipse observed from the island of Príncipe off the west coast of Africa, he…
- Emmy NoetherIn a joint faculty meeting at the University of Göttingen, one professor protested aloud: "What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?" The mathematician…
- Nevile HendersonSir Nevile Meyrick Henderson was born at Sedgwick Park, near Horsham, Sussex on the 10th of June 1882. He grew up as the third child of Robert Henderson and Emma Caroline Hargreaves in a home he would later describe as the white cliffs of…
- Pavel FlorenskyPavel Alexandrovich Florensky was shot dead on the night of the 8th of December 1937, in a wood not far from Leningrad, transported there in a special train alongside some 500 other prisoners. The site of his burial remains unknown. He was…