Curated playlist
1908 births
- Bill WeisbandWhy did the U.S. never charge Bill Weisband with spying? A spy trial would have exposed its codebreaking methods.
- James StewartJames Stewart gave his Oscar to his father for the shop window.
- Eberhard ReesWernher von Braun personally chose Eberhard Rees to lead the Marshall Space Flight Center.
- Bette DavisBette Davis's tombstone reads, "She did it the hard way." A director suggested the epitaph after All About Eve.
- Lyndon B. JohnsonLyndon B. Johnson took the presidential oath from a woman, a first for any American president.
- Valentin GlushkoValentin Petrovich Glushko was born on the 2nd of September 1908 in Odesa, and by the age of fourteen he was thinking about flight. Novels by Jules Verne had pulled him toward aeronautics. In 1923 he wrote a letter to Konstantin…
- David LeanFilm critics spent two hours tearing apart David Lean's Ryan's Daughter to his face at a New York lunch.
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died in 2009, and for four days the world did not know.
- Simone de BeauvoirSimone de Beauvoir's partnership with Sartre began on a bench outside the Louvre.
- Edward TellerEdward Teller stood and watched the Trinity test while nearly everyone else lay face-down.
- Thurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court. He later became a justice there.
- C. Vann WoodwardC. Vann Woodward argued that Jim Crow was chosen late, not inherited from Southern tradition.
- Oskar SchindlerOskar Schindler stood on a factory floor in Brünnlitz on the 7th of May 1945, surrounded by Jewish workers who owed him their lives, and listened to a radio. The voice was Winston Churchill's, announcing that Germany had surrendered and…
- Gabriel Turville-PetreIn August 1942, the Foreign Office sent Gabriel Turville-Petre to the Faroe Islands for two months. The stated purpose was "in order to study the inhabitants, their politics and conditions of life." Edward Oswald Gabriel Turville-Petre was…
- Arthur AdamovIn Arthur Adamov's play Le Professeur Taranne, every denial the accused man offers becomes proof of guilt.
- Lev LandauPhysicist Lev Landau was jailed in 1938 over a leaflet comparing Stalinism to Nazism. A letter to Stalin freed him.
- Sam GiancanaSam Giancana, who once ran the Chicago Outfit, died on the night of the 19th of June 1975 in the basement kitchen of his house in Oak Park, Illinois. At around 11 p.m., his caretaker, Joseph DiPersio, found the body on the floor. A gunman…
- Abe SilversteinAbe Silverstein, a NASA engineer, gave the Apollo program its name. He chose a Greek and Roman god of light and the sun.
- Ezriel CarlebachA street in Tel Aviv bears the name of Ezriel Carlebach, and so does a large underground light rail station nearby. Both stand close to the offices of Ma'ariv, the newspaper he led. Carlebach was a journalist and editorial writer who…