Curated playlist
1887 births
- Alvin HansenAlvin Harvey Hansen was born on the 23rd of August 1887 in Viborg, South Dakota, the son of a farmer. He died in 1975 having done more to shape American economic policy than perhaps any other economist of his century. Paul McCracken,…
- Marcel DuchampMarcel Duchamp walked into a New York exhibition hall in 1917 and submitted a urinal for display. He had signed it with a pseudonym, "R. Mutt", and titled it Fountain. The show committee declared it was not art and turned it away. Duchamp…
- Le CorbusierLe Corbusier insisted that "a house is a machine to live in," a maxim that would unsettle architects for a century. The man who wrote it was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, a watchmaker's son with no formal training as an architect. He…
- Chiang Kai-shekChiang Kai-shek was born on the 31st of October 1887, in Xikou, a small town in Fenghua, Zhejiang, about 30 kilometers west of central Ningbo. His father died when he was eight years old. His mother, whom he later described as the…
- Marc ChagallMarc Chagall spent nearly a century alive on earth, and almost every one of those years was spent either fleeing something or painting it. Born Moishe Shagal in 1887 in a Jewish family near Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, he died in 1985…
- Erwin SchrödingerErwin Schrödinger was born on the 12th of August 1887 in Vienna, and by the time he died on the 4th of January 1961, he had left behind an equation that altered how humanity understands the fabric of reality. He had also coined a phrase -…
- Sheila Kaye-SmithSheila Kaye-Smith was born on the 4th of February 1887 in St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings, in Sussex. She spent most of her life in that county, writing novels rooted so deeply in the borderlands of Sussex and Kent that the landscape…
- Mamoru ShigemitsuMamoru Shigemitsu walked with a cane and an artificial right leg to the deck of a battleship on the 2nd of September 1945 and signed the document that ended Japan's war. The leg was gone because of a bomb thrown thirteen years earlier at a…
- Lutz Graf Schwerin von KrosigkLutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk holds a strange and troubling distinction: he was the finance minister of Germany from 1932 all the way to 1945, outlasting three chancellors and serving under the man who would start the deadliest war in…
- Nikolai VavilovNikolai Vavilov carried a pet lizard in his pocket through the halls of the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy. That small, eccentric detail captures something essential about the man: a scientist who moved through the world with an…
- Edwin MuirEdwin Muir was born on the 15th of May 1887 at the farm of Folly in Deerness, a parish in Orkney, and in his own words he arrived in Glasgow in 1901 feeling as though a hundred and fifty years had been burned away in a two-day journey.…
- Pieter GeylPieter Geyl spent thirteen months inside Buchenwald concentration camp with a half-finished argument in his pocket. The Dutch historian had written an article about Napoleon just before the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940.…
- Prince Naruhiko HigashikuniPrince Naruhiko Higashikuni held the office of Japanese prime minister for exactly 54 days. He took power on the 17th of August 1945, two days after Emperor Showa announced Japan's surrender, and resigned on the 9th of October of the same…
- Jim ThorpeJim Thorpe walked past a high jump pit one day at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, still wearing his street clothes, and leaped 5 feet 9 inches , clearing the school record without a single warmup. That impromptu jump in 1907 was a…