Curated playlist
1968 deaths
- John SteinbeckJohn Steinbeck once stole bacon from a local produce market to survive. During the Great Depression, he and his first wife lived on fish and crabs he gathered from the sea, vegetables from his garden, and welfare when those sources failed.…
- Karl BarthKarl Barth appeared on the cover of Time magazine on the 20th of April 1962 - a Swiss theologian whose arguments about God had somehow broken out of seminaries and lecture halls and into the mainstream of American religious culture. He was…
- T. S. AshtonT. S. Ashton spent his life arguing that the Industrial Revolution was not a catastrophe but an achievement. Thomas Southcliffe Ashton was born on the 11th of January 1889, in an era when the factories and foundries of northern England…
- Marcel DuchampMarcel Duchamp walked into a New York exhibition hall in 1917 and submitted a urinal for display. He had signed it with a pseudonym, "R. Mutt", and titled it Fountain. The show committee declared it was not art and turned it away. Duchamp…
- Alfred CobbanAlfred Cobban walked into his inaugural lecture as Professor of French History at University College London in 1954 and proceeded to dismantle one of the most entrenched interpretations in modern historical scholarship. His target was what…
- Upton SinclairUpton Sinclair once wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." He penned that line to explain why California newspaper editors refused to take his ideas seriously.…
- Muriel LesterMuriel Lester turned down a place at Cambridge University to live in voluntary poverty in one of London's poorest districts. That choice, made in the early 1900s, would set her on a path that took her from the slums of Bow to the ashrams…
- Marshall HodgsonMarshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson died on the 10th of June, 1968, while jogging on the campus of the University of Chicago. He was 46. At the time of his death, his most important work had never been published. The three-volume manuscript he…
- Stanley Unwin (publisher)A blue plaque at 13 Handen Road in Lee, Lewisham marks the birthplace of Sir Stanley Unwin, born there on the 19th of December 1884. The plaque was placed after his death in October 1968. Between those two dates, he built George Allen &…
- George GamowGeorge Gamow once loaded a kayak with supplies for a 250-kilometer crossing of the Black Sea. The year was 1932. He and his wife Lyubov were trying to paddle from Soviet territory to Turkey. Poor weather foiled the attempt, and the…
- Alexandre KojèveAlexandre Kojève died on the 4th of June 1968, shortly after giving a talk in Brussels. He had appeared before European Economic Community officials as a representative of the French government. That double life, philosopher by training…
- 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 had already taught himself both differential and integral calculus. What kind of…
- Leopold InfeldLeopold Infeld, born on the 20th of August 1898 in Kraków, spent years working alongside Albert Einstein himself, yet he died without a Nobel Prize to his name. He co-wrote a book with Einstein. He helped formulate equations describing how…
- Yuri GagarinYuri Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth on the 12th of April 1961, and did it in 108 minutes. The spacecraft was called Vostok 1. The call sign Gagarin chose for himself was Kedr, the Russian word for Siberian pine. At the moment of…
- Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract. The year was 1934, and the painting was Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. Panofsky…
- Vittorio PozzoVittorio Pozzo holds a record that no man in the history of men's international football has ever equalled. He coached Italy to the FIFA World Cup in 1934 and again in 1938, making him the only manager to lead a single national team to two…