Curated category
1908 births
- Bill WeisbandBill Weisband carried a secret that may have set back American codebreaking by years, and he carried it to his grave. Born in Odessa in 1908, he arrived in…
- James StewartJames Stewart gave away his only competitive Academy Award. He won Best Actor for the 1940 romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story, then handed the statuette…
- Eberhard ReesEberhard Rees arrived at the Army Research Center Peenemünde in the spring of 1939. He managed V-2 rocket fabrication and assembly during World War II.
- Bette DavisBette Davis died on the 6th of October, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, too weak to make the journey home after her cancer…
- Lyndon B. JohnsonLyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States aboard Air Force One, just hours after the assassination of John F.
- Valentin GlushkoValentin Glushko was born on the 2nd of September 1908 in Odesa to a Ukrainian Cossack father and a Russian peasant mother.
- David LeanDavid Lean spent fourteen years in silence after one of the most brutal critical encounters in cinema history. At a lunch in the Algonquin Hotel in New York…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy…
- Simone de BeauvoirSimone de Beauvoir did not consider herself a philosopher, and at the time of her death in 1986 the world did not call her one either.
- Edward TellerEdward Teller watched the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 while almost everyone else lay face-down on the ground with their backs turned.
- Thurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall walked into the Supreme Court as an advocate 32 times and walked out a winner 29 of those times. That record alone would make him one of…
- C. Vann WoodwardC. Vann Woodward was born on the 13th of November 1908, in Vanndale, Arkansas, a small town that bore his own mother's family name and had served as a county…
- Gabriel Turville-PetreGabriel Turville-Petre entered the world at Bosworth Hall in Husbands Bosworth, Leicestershire on the 25th of March 1908.
- Arthur AdamovArthur Adamov was born on the 23rd of August 1908 in Kislovodsk, a spa town in the Terek Oblast of the Russian Empire, into a wealthy Armenian family.
- Lev LandauLev Davidovich Landau was born on the 22nd of January 1908, in Baku, then part of the Russian Empire, and before he was old enough to attend university he…
- Abe SilversteinAbe Silverstein named the Apollo program after the Greek and Roman god of light and the sun, a choice that would define one of humanity's greatest…
- Ezriel CarlebachEzriel Carlebach was born in Leipzig on the 7th of November 1908 into a family of rabbis. His father Ephraim Carlebach founded the Höhere Israelitische…