Curated playlist
1956 deaths
- Bertolt BrechtBertolt Brecht walked out of a Congressional hearing in Washington on the 30th of October 1947, thanked by the committee chairman for his cooperation, and boarded a plane for Europe the very next morning. He never returned to the United…
- Manilal GandhiManilal Mohandas Gandhi was born on the 28th of October 1892 in Rajkot, British India, the second of four sons in one of the most consequential families of the twentieth century. His father was Mohandas Gandhi. His life would be shaped,…
- A. A. MilneA. A. Milne taught himself to read at the age of two. That detail feels right for a man who would spend his life in thrall to words, though the books that made him famous were not the ones he cared most about writing. Alan Alexander Milne…
- Sheila Kaye-SmithSheila Kaye-Smith was born on the 4th of February 1887 in St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings, in Sussex. She spent most of her life in that county, writing novels rooted so deeply in the borderlands of Sussex and Kent that the landscape…
- Jules RimetJules Rimet crossed the Atlantic in 1930 carrying a trophy in his bag. No guards, no ceremony; just a French football administrator on a steamship called the SS Conte Verde, headed for Uruguay, with the physical object that would become…
- Alex RaymondAlexander Gillespie Raymond Jr. was born on the 2nd of October 1909 in New Rochelle, New York. His father worked as a civil engineer and road builder who encouraged his son's love of drawing from an early age. The elder Raymond covered one…
- B. R. AmbedkarB. R. Ambedkar was born on the 14th of April 1891 in the town and military cantonment of Mhow, as the 14th and last child of an army officer. He was born into the Mahar caste, classified as untouchable, and as a child he was forbidden from…
- George SartonGeorge Sarton buried his life's work in a garden in Belgium. It was August 1914, and German soldiers were advancing on Ghent. Sarton, a young scholar who had spent years compiling notes for a sweeping history of science, wrapped his Civil…
- Fletcher PrattIn February 1916, an Associated Press dispatch reported the arrest of Murray Fletcher Pratt in Geneva, New York. Pratt was a college student at the time. He had broken into cash drawers across town on a series of midnight runs, netting…
- 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 Schule there and served as a rabbi until his death in 1936. Ezriel spent his youth…