Curated playlist
1900 births
- Noburō ŌfujiNoburō Ōfuji left behind a legacy so enduring that one of Japan's most prestigious film prizes carries his name. The Mainichi Film Awards' Ōfuji Noburō Award, given annually to the finest animated work in the country, honors a man who…
- Kurt WeillKurt Julian Weill was born on the 2nd of March 1900 in Dessau, the son of a synagogue cantor, and he died in New York City on the 3rd of April 1950, just days after turning fifty. In that half-century he crossed continents, languages, and…
- Heinrich HimmlerHeinrich Himmler was reluctant to open his mouth. A British doctor in Lüneburg leaned in to examine it on the 23rd of May 1945, and the prisoner jerked his head away. Then he bit down on a hidden potassium cyanide pill and collapsed onto…
- Ruhollah KhomeiniRuhollah Khomeini died on the 3rd of June 1989, and the streets of Tehran became something the world had never quite seen before. Up to ten million people poured out to mourn him, one fifth of Iran's entire population, producing what is…
- Jørgen VogtJørgen Herman Vogt was born on the 23rd of September 1900 in Kristiania, the city that would later be renamed Oslo, into a family whose name was already well established in Norwegian public life. His father Johan Herman Lie Vogt held a…
- Aaron CoplandAaron Copland grew up above a Brooklyn shop at 628 Washington Avenue, in a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who had traveled through Scotland just to afford the boat fare to America. His father had no interest in music. His mother…
- Devdas GandhiDevdas Mohandas Gandhi was born on the 22nd of May 1900 in the Colony of Natal, far from the subcontinent his father would one day help liberate. He was the fourth and youngest son of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. Unlike his famous…
- Margaret MitchellMargaret Mitchell wrote exactly one published novel in her lifetime, and it sold a million copies in its first six months. Gone with the Wind arrived in June 1936, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937, and never really left. But the…
- Urho KekkonenUrho Kaleva Kekkonen was born in a smoke sauna in a small cabin in Pielavesi, Finland, on the 3rd of September 1900. His father had built a chimney in the house just before his arrival. That detail matters, because years later, political…
- Erich FrommErich Fromm was born on the 23rd of March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Rosa and Naphtali Fromm, and he would spend the next eight decades asking a question that unsettled everyone who heard it: why do people choose their…
- Theodosius DobzhanskyTheodosius Dobzhansky was born on the 25th of January 1900 in Nemirov, a small town in what was then the Russian Empire, to a mathematics teacher and his wife who had prayed to St. Theodosius of Chernigov for a child. That unusual name…