Curated playlist
1890 births
- H. P. LovecraftH. P. Lovecraft died in 1937 virtually unknown to readers. His monsters later became global touchstones.
- Agatha ChristieAgatha Christie vanished for 11 days in 1926, and a nationwide manhunt followed. She was found at a Harrogate hotel.
- Dwight D. EisenhowerEisenhower wrote a note taking all blame if D-Day failed. He drafted it on the eve of the June 1944 landings.
- Vyacheslav MolotovFinns named the Molotov cocktail after Vyacheslav Molotov, who called bombing raids food deliveries.
- Charles de GaulleCharles de Gaulle tried five times to escape German prison camps in the First World War. He even posed as a nurse.
- Karel ČapekNazi agents came to arrest Karel Čapek months after he had already died. They found only his wife, Olga.
- TaixuA Chinese Buddhist monk questioned whether God exists. Taixu asked how an all-powerful being could have a beginning.
- Maurice PodoloffMaurice Podoloff suspended 32 players for life over a point-shaving scandal. He was the NBA's first commissioner.
- Allan NevinsIn 1948, historian Allan Nevins started the first institutionalized oral history program in the United States.
- Boris PasternakBoris Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, then his government forced him to decline it.
- Colonel SandersHarland David Sanders, known around the world as Colonel Sanders, was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville wearing a white suit and a black western string tie. It was the outfit he had worn in public for the last twenty years of his…
- Adolphe MenjouAdolphe Menjou, an engineer from Pittsburgh, became Hollywood's ideal of Parisian elegance.
- E. Merton CoulterHistorian E. Merton Coulter had a grandfather indicted over Ku Klux Klan violence. An all-white jury acquitted him.
- El LissitzkyEl Lissitzky made a tank poster while dying of tuberculosis in 1941. The artist urged Soviet people to build more tanks.
- Ho Chi MinhOn the 30th of April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon carrying a poster addressed to a man who had died years earlier. That man was Hồ Chí Minh, the revolutionary who founded North Vietnam. The poster carried the words of a…