Curated playlist
1891 births
- James ChadwickIn February 1932, after only about two weeks at the laboratory bench, James Chadwick sent a letter to the journal Nature with a deliberately tentative title: "Possible Existence of a Neutron." Three months later, the hedging was gone. His…
- Max ErnstMax Ernst died on the 1st of August 1914. That, at least, was how he described it. In his autobiography, he wrote: "On the first of August 1914 M.E. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918." Those dates bracket the four…
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was born on the 18th of May 1891 in Ronsdorf, in what is now the city of Wuppertal, Germany. At the age of 14, he taught himself Esperanto and attended the World Congress of Esperanto in Dresden in 1908. That detail says…
- Erwin RommelErwin Rommel rode into Tripoli on the 12th of February 1941 as commander of a freshly created desert force, the Afrika Korps, with orders to hold a defensive line. He ignored them within weeks. By the time the war in North Africa ended, he…
- Sergei ProkofievSergei Prokofiev died on the 5th of March 1953 , the same day as Joseph Stalin. His coffin had to be carried by hand through the back streets of Moscow, away from the vast crowds mourning the dictator. About 30 people attended his funeral.…
- Karl DönitzKarl Dönitz spent the last days of the Second World War not in a submarine, but in the office of the German head of state. Born on the 16th of September 1891 in Grünau, near Berlin, he rose from a junior naval officer to become the man…
- B. R. AmbedkarB. R. Ambedkar was born on the 14th of April 1891 in the town and military cantonment of Mhow, as the 14th and last child of an army officer. He was born into the Mahar caste, classified as untouchable, and as a child he was forbidden from…
- Mikhail BulgakovMikhail Bulgakov typed the last pages of The Master and Margarita knowing they would likely never be read. In a letter to his wife on the 15th of June 1938, he described 327 manuscript pages, roughly 22 chapters, waiting on his desk. He…
- Fumimaro KonoeFumimaro Konoe committed suicide on the morning of the 16th of December 1945, swallowing potassium cyanide in his room rather than face arrest for war crimes. The night before, his son Michitaka had searched that same room for weapons and…
- Hans KohnHans Kohn was born on the 15th of September 1891, in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a German-speaking Jewish family. He died on the 16th of March 1971. By then, American scholars associated his name with the study…
- Oskar HaleckiOskar Halecki was born in Vienna on the 26th of May 1891, the son of a Polish officer serving in the Austrian Army. His father, Oscar Chalecki-Halecki, rose to the rank of lieutenant field-marshal. That military pedigree shaped none of the…