Curated playlist
1889 births
- Charlie ChaplinCharlie Chaplin was sent to a workhouse twice before the age of nine. By 14, he had taken his own mother to an infirmary, watched her return to a mental asylum, and slept rough in the streets of London while searching for food. Within a…
- Martin HeideggerMartin Heidegger was born on the 26th of September 1889 in rural Meßkirch, Baden, the son of a village church sexton. He died in his sleep in Freiburg on the 26th of May 1976, and was buried two days later in his birthplace, beside his…
- T. S. AshtonT. S. Ashton spent his life arguing that the Industrial Revolution was not a catastrophe but an achievement. Thomas Southcliffe Ashton was born on the 11th of January 1889, in an era when the factories and foundries of northern England…
- Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was born on the 20th of April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary near the German border. He died by suicide on the 30th of April 1945, in a bunker beneath a city in ruins. Between those two dates lies the…
- Jawaharlal NehruJawaharlal Nehru was sworn in as prime minister at the stroke of midnight on the 15th of August 1947, and he raised the Indian flag at the Red Fort in Delhi. His speech that night carried a phrase that would outlive him: a tryst with…
- Jean CocteauJean Cocteau called himself a poet, and only a poet, even after he had written novels, staged plays, drawn erotica, and directed films that critics still study. He divided his entire output into kinds of poetry: poésie de roman, poésie de…
- Anna AkhmatovaAnna Akhmatova chose a Tatar surname for herself because her father refused to see any verses printed under his "respectable" name. The surname she took was her grandmother's: Akhmatova, carrying the lineage of Khan Akhmat, a descendant of…
- Edwin HubbleEdwin Hubble grew up in Marshfield, Missouri, known more for his athletic prowess than his intellect, a boy who won seven first places and a third in a single high school track meet in 1906. He earned good grades in every subject except…
- Igor SikorskyIgor Sikorsky built a small rubber band-powered helicopter at age 12, long before the world had any reason to believe such machines could carry a person. That boyhood model, assembled in Kiev in the early 1900s, contained the seed of an…
- Gabriel MarcelGabriel Honoré Marcel was born on the 7th of December 1889 in Paris, and by the time he died on the 8th of October 1973 he had written more than a dozen philosophical books and at least thirty plays. Yet he spent much of his life…
- Walter LippmannWalter Lippmann was born on the Upper East Side of New York City on the 23rd of September 1889, and by the time he died eighty-five years later, he had done something few journalists ever manage: he had changed the language people use to…