Curated playlist
1917 births
- John F. KennedyJohn Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade. He was 46 years old, and had served as the 35th president of the United States for less than three years. The man…
- Ella FitzgeraldElla Jane Fitzgerald walked onto the stage of the Apollo Theater on the 21st of November 1934, planning to dance. She was 17 years old, and she had recently survived a state reformatory, homelessness, and years of grief. She had no…
- Ferdinand MarcosFerdinand Marcos arrived in Hawaii in February 1986 with 22 crates of cash valued at $717 million, 300 crates of jewelry, and a 12 by 4 foot box full of pearls. He had just fled the Philippines after two decades in power. He served as the…
- Indira GandhiOn the 31st of October 1984, Indira Gandhi walked toward a wicket gate in the garden at 1 Safdarjung Road in New Delhi. Two of her own Sikh bodyguards stood waiting. She was on her way to be interviewed by the British filmmaker Peter…
- Nur Muhammad TarakiNur Muhammad Taraki was born on the 14th of July 1917 to a peasant family in the Nawa District of Ghazni Province, in what was then the Emirate of Afghanistan. By his mid-thirties, Soviet officials were calling him "Afghanistan's Maxim…
- Jack KirbyJack Kirby drew at least 20,318 pages of published art and another 1,385 covers across his career. In 1962 alone he published 1,158 pages. He worked twelve to fourteen hours a day at a drawing table in his home, turning out four to five…
- Arthur C. ClarkeIn February 1945, a young radar officer named Arthur C. Clarke sent a letter to the editor of Wireless World. He suggested that stations placed in geostationary orbit could relay radio signals across the entire planet. He never patented…
- Caspar WeinbergerCaspar Weinberger spent six years and ten months as Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, longer than anyone except Robert McNamara and, more recently, Donald Rumsfeld. That tenure placed him at the center of one of the most…
- Al CerviAl Cervi earned the nickname "Digger" not for anything gentle, but for the way he dug into opponents on defense. Born on the 12th of February 1917 in Buffalo, New York, Cervi spent decades as one of the hardest-nosed backcourt players in…
- Jean MassinJean Massin was born in 1917 and died in 1986. For part of his life he answered to a different title than historian: priest. By the time he died, his name sat on studies of composers, chronicles of revolutionaries, and an edition of a…
- Jean-Pierre MelvilleJean-Pierre Melville died on the 2nd of August 1973 while eating dinner with writer Philippe Labro at the Hôtel PLM Saint-Jacques restaurant in Paris. He was 55 years old, and he had written the first 200 shots of his next film that…
- Eric HobsbawmEric John Ernest Hobsbawm was born on the 9th of June 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, and he died on the 1st of October 2012 in London, just shy of his 96th birthday. In 2002, a right-leaning magazine called The Spectator described him as…
- Elliot ForbesElliot Forbes entered the world on the 20th of August 1917, into a family that defined Boston's cultural elite. His father Edward Forbes directed Harvard's Fogg Art Museum while his mother was Margaret Laighton. This lineage placed him at…
- Karl SteinbuchKarl Steinbuch was born on the 15th of June 1917 in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt. He studied physics at the University of Stuttgart during a time when Germany was under total control by the National Socialist regime. By the early 1930s, he had…
- Larry O'BrienLarry O'Brien was riding in the motorcade in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963 when gunshots rang out. He watched President John F. Kennedy die. Then he accompanied the coffin and Jackie Kennedy back to Air Force One at Love Field. And…
- Red AuerbachRed Auerbach lit a cigar on the bench while the game was still being played. It was his signal to the opposing team, to the crowd, to anyone watching: this one is over. The habit became so iconic that Boston restaurants in the 1960s posted…