Curated playlist
1895 births
- Milton WaldmanMilton Waldman entered the world in 1895 within the city limits of Cleveland, Ohio. His early education took place at Yale University before he joined the United States Army during the First World War. This military service shaped his…
- Phillip FormanPhillip Forman swore in Albert Einstein as a United States citizen in 1940. That moment, quiet and bureaucratic on its surface, placed a federal judge from Trenton, New Jersey at the center of one of the most celebrated naturalizations in…
- Buster KeatonBuster Keaton never smiled on screen. Not when a two-ton building facade toppled directly onto him, leaving only the gap of an open window between his body and certain death. Not when a wall of water from a railroad tower broke his neck…
- Edmund WilsonEdmund Wilson Jr. sent a postcard. Not to a friend, not to an editor, but to strangers who wrote asking for his time. The card listed, in exhaustive detail, every request he would not honor: reading manuscripts, delivering lectures,…
- Mikhail BakhtinMikhail Bakhtin spent six years working as a bookkeeper in the provincial Kazakh town of Kustanai, exiled there by the Soviet secret police. He had been arrested on the 8th of December 1928, just before the tenth anniversary of the…
- Sergei YeseninSergei Yesenin was found dead on the 28th of December 1925 in his room at the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad. He was thirty years old. The day before, he had cut his wrist and used his own blood to write a farewell poem. That poem,…
- T. D. KendrickT. D. Kendrick spent much of his life keeping secrets. In 1941, an ARP warden pulled a newborn girl alive from the rubble of a Blitz-damaged home. Her mother had died in that same raid, barely ten weeks after giving birth. The child, Sally…
- Walter Bedell SmithWalter Bedell Smith signed the Italian armistice beneath an olive tree at Cassibile, Sicily, on the 3rd of September 1943. The ceremony was simple. Smith represented the Allied coalition. Across the table sat Generale di Brigata Giuseppe…
- George HalasGeorge Halas was running late in 1915, and that delay saved his life. He had planned to board the SS Eastland in Chicago but was trying to put on weight for Big Ten football. He never made it to the docks. The ship capsized, killing 844…
- Paul HindemithPaul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, on the 16th of November 1895, and within two decades he would be playing concertmaster at the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra. He was a composer, yes, but also a theorist, a teacher, a violist, a…
- Lewis MumfordLewis Mumford was born on the 19th of October 1895 in Flushing, Queens, and spent the next nine decades becoming one of the most wide-ranging thinkers America ever produced. He never finished a college degree. Tuberculosis interrupted his…
- Richard SorgeRichard Sorge arrived in Yokohama on the 6th of September 1933, carrying press credentials from the most prestigious newspaper in Germany and a Nazi Party membership card fresh from Berlin. Joseph Goebbels had attended his farewell dinner.…