Curated playlist
1884 births
- Louis B. MayerLouis B. Mayer was the son of a Yiddish-speaking scrap metal dealer from a Ukrainian village, and he died the highest-paid man in the United States for nine consecutive years. Between those two facts lies one of the most improbable stories…
- Harry S. TrumanHarry S. Truman became the 33rd president of the United States not by winning an election, but by walking into a room where Eleanor Roosevelt told him her husband was dead. He had been vice president for only 82 days. He had never been…
- Édouard DaladierÉdouard Daladier landed at Le Bourget Airfield on the 30th of September 1938 to a crowd of cheering Parisians. They waved and shouted, relieved that the man returning from Munich had kept France out of another war. Daladier looked out at…
- Sulaiman NadviSulaiman Nadvi was born on the 22nd of November 1884 in Desna, a village in what is now Nalanda District, Bihar, and he died on the same date in 1953, exactly sixty-nine years later, in Karachi. That symmetry is one of the stranger…
- Bronisław MalinowskiBronisław Malinowski arrived in the Trobriand Islands in 1915 having already made one embarrassing mistake. On his first field trip, lodged with a local missionary, he had relied on a translator to reach the people he was meant to study.…
- Rudolf BultmannRudolf Bultmann once told his students that it did not matter what happened throughout Jesus's life. To Bultmann, only that Jesus existed, preached, and died by crucifixion mattered. He called this the difference between the "thatness" and…
- Stanley Unwin (publisher)A blue plaque at 13 Handen Road in Lee, Lewisham marks the birthplace of Sir Stanley Unwin, born there on the 19th of December 1884. The plaque was placed after his death in October 1968. Between those two dates, he built George Allen &…
- George SartonGeorge Sarton buried his life's work in a garden in Belgium. It was August 1914, and German soldiers were advancing on Ghent. Sarton, a young scholar who had spent years compiling notes for a sweeping history of science, wrapped his Civil…
- Hideki TojoHideki Tojo was awakened at 5:00 a.m. on the 8th of December 1941 and told that Japanese planes had struck the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Within hours, he was on the radio announcing that Japan was now at war with the United…
- Otto RankOn his deathbed in New York City on the 31st of October 1939, Otto Rank reportedly said a single word: "Komisch." It means "funny" or "strange." A kidney infection had taken the Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and philosopher who was born…
- İsmet İnönüİsmet İnönü stood inside a railroad car near Adana in January 1943, face to face with Winston Churchill. Turkey had spent years balancing between the Allies and the Axis, and Churchill had traveled to Ankara specifically to pull it off…
- Jakob LaubJakob Johann Laub was born on the 7th of February 1884 in Rzeszów, a city then part of Austria-Hungary, and he died on the 22nd of April 1962 in Fribourg. His name appears in the history of physics not as a soloist, but as a collaborator…
- Yevgeny ZamyatinYevgeny Zamyatin spent his final years in Paris dying in poverty, his name unmentioned in any Soviet newspaper, his most famous novel banned in his own country for decades. He had been an Old Bolshevik, a trained naval engineer, a man who…
- A. MerrittA. Merritt earned $100,000 a year by the end of his life, but the work he is remembered for was never his day job. Abraham Grace Merritt, born on the 20th of January 1884 in Beverly, New Jersey, spent his professional life as a magazine…
- Peter DebyePeter Debye was born in Maastricht in the Netherlands on the 24th of March 1884, and by the time he died on the 2nd of November 1966, his name had been attached to a unit of measurement, a lunar crater, a minor planet, and more than a…