Curated playlist
1906 births
- Leonid BrezhnevIn a 2013 Levada Center poll, Russians named Leonid Brezhnev their favorite 20th-century leader.
- Yin ShunYin Shun accepted a rejected young nun as a disciple within the hour. She became Cheng Yen, founder of Tzu Chi.
- Samuel BeckettSamuel Beckett once drove a young André the Giant to school. The future wrestler was a boy in rural France then.
- Lew GradeLew Grade offered to make The Muppet Show in Britain after American networks turned Jim Henson down.
- Bugsy SiegelBenjamin Siegel, the American mobster the world remembers as Bugsy, despised that name. It came from slang for crazy, and he told people to call him Ben or Mr. Siegel. During his murder trial in 1941, some reporters wrote that his eyes…
- Dmitri ShostakovichStalin walked out of Dmitri Shostakovich's opera in 1936, and the next day Pravda attacked it.
- Adolf EichmannAdolf Eichmann sat behind bulletproof glass in a Jerusalem auditorium called Beit Ha'am on the 11th of April 1961. The glass was there to protect him from any attempt on his life. The building had been modified so that journalists could…
- Hannah ArendtHannah Arendt's name is printed on journals, schools, scholarly prizes, humanitarian prizes, think-tanks and street signs. It also appears on stamps and monuments. She was born Johanna Arendt, and she grew into one of the most influential…
- Robert E. HowardRobert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, died at thirty with almost none of his work in a book.
- PuyiPuyi, the last emperor of China, was born in Beijing on the 7th of February 1906 and died on the 17th of October 1967. A commentator named Wen Yuan-ning once quipped that Puyi had been "made emperor three times without knowing why and…
- Philo FarnsworthPhilo Farnsworth, inventor of electronic television, won a carton of cigarettes on a 1957 quiz show.
- Ed GeinEd Gein was a quiet handyman from Plainfield, Wisconsin, and the last receipt Bernice Worden ever wrote was for him. It was a sales slip for a gallon of antifreeze, written on the morning of the 16th of November 1957. By that evening, the…
- Kurt GödelIn 1931, Kurt Gödel proved that any sufficiently powerful math system contains true statements it cannot prove.
- Delano AmesDelano Ames created a husband-and-wife pair of amateur detectives in 1948.
- James E. WebbJames Webb left NASA on his 62nd birthday, days before Apollo's first crewed flight. He had run it since 1961.
- Ike DuffeyIke Duffey owned the team that won the last National Basketball League title.
- Tony AccardoIn 1939, Tony Accardo stood for a photograph beside a 400-pound tuna he had caught on a fishing trip to Wedgeport, Nova Scotia. Chicago newspapers promptly christened him "The Big Tuna." Accardo was a mobster in the American Mafia, and…
- Grace HopperGrace Hopper hung a clock on her office wall that ran counterclockwise. She wanted code in plain English.
- Ilse KochIlse Koch held no rank and no official post in Nazi Germany, yet by the end of the war she was among its most notorious figures. Her husband, Karl-Otto Koch, was the commandant of Buchenwald, and the press branded her the "Kommandeuse of…
- Hermann FegeleinHermann Fegelein was a Waffen-SS general and the brother-in-law of Eva Braun, and his death in April 1945 is told in more than one way. Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's secretaries, was inside the Berlin bunker that week. She said Fegelein…