Curated playlist
1907 births
- Jean BeaufretJean Beaufret's 1946 challenge to Heidegger produced the Letter on Humanism.
- Katharine HepburnKatharine Hepburn bought out her own studio contract after theater owners called her box office poison.
- HergéHergé was arrested the day after Brussels was liberated in 1944. He had drawn Tintin for a Nazi-controlled paper.
- John WayneJohn Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison and got his new name from a dog.
- Laurence OlivierLaurence Olivier's 1948 film Hamlet was the first non-American film to win Best Picture.
- W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died hours after reading his poems aloud in a Vienna hotel.
- L. Sprague de CampL. Sprague de Camp turned the word extraterrestrial into a noun. He also coined E.T. in a 1939 magazine article.
- Paul NitzePaul Nitze went to Japan to assess the damage after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It shaped his nuclear thinking for life.
- Frida KahloFrida Kahlo had her four-poster bed carried into her first Mexican solo show. She spent the opening party lying in it.
- Sergei KorolevSergei Korolev stepped out of a black ZIS 110 limousine with his coat collar turned up and his hat brim pulled low. The cosmonaut Alexei Leonov watched from a window and could not make out the visitor's face. He saw only a man a little…
- Astrid LindgrenIn 1976, Astrid Lindgren's tax rate hit 102 percent. She answered with a satirical story in a newspaper.
- Frederick CoplestonWorld War II closed Frederick Copleston's path to a Rome doctorate. He taught at Heythrop instead.
- Lucien LaurentLucien Laurent, a Peugeot factory worker, scored the first goal in World Cup history.
- John G. TrumpJohn G. Trump died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 21st of February 1985, six days before a White House ceremony in his honor. His son John Jr. accepted the National Medal of Science on his behalf. President Ronald Reagan had awarded…