Curated playlist
1970 deaths
- Jimi HendrixJimi Hendrix died in London on the 18th of September 1970, at the age of 27, from barbiturate-related asphyxia. He was, by then, the world's highest-paid rock musician. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted his band in 1992, calls…
- Gonzague de ReynoldGonzague de Reynold was born on the 15th of June 1880 in a sixteenth-century chateau in Cressier, into the minor Fribourgeois nobility of Switzerland. He died on the 9th of April 1970, ninety years old, having spent six full decades…
- Sharda MehtaSharda Mehta received her Bachelor of Arts in Logic and Moral Philosophy from Gujarat College in 1901. That degree made her one of the first two women to hold a university qualification in what is now Gujarat. Behind that achievement stood…
- Charles de GaulleCharles de Gaulle was born on the 22nd of November 1890 in Lille, the third of five children in a devoutly Catholic, conservative, and monarchist household. He died on the 9th of November 1970, leaving his presidential memoirs unfinished.…
- Allen LaneAllen Lane was born in Bristol on the 21st of September 1902, and by the time he died in 1970, he had changed what it meant to buy a book. The question at the heart of his story is a simple one: why should a good book cost more than a bar…
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was born on the 18th of May 1891 in Ronsdorf, in what is now the city of Wuppertal, Germany. At the age of 14, he taught himself Esperanto and attended the World Congress of Esperanto in Dresden in 1908. That detail says…
- Édouard DaladierÉdouard Daladier landed at Le Bourget Airfield on the 30th of September 1938 to a crowd of cheering Parisians. They waved and shouted, relieved that the man returning from Munich had kept France out of another war. Daladier looked out at…
- Lev KuleshovLev Kuleshov placed the same footage of an actor named Ivan Mozzhukhin next to a bowl of soup, then a coffin, then a woman reclining on a couch. The actor's face never changed. Yet audiences watching each version were convinced they saw…
- SukarnoSukarno was born Koesno Sosrodihardjo on the 6th of June 1901, in Surabaya, East Java, the son of a Muslim Javanese primary school teacher and a Hindu Balinese mother from the Brahmin caste. By the time he died on the 21st of June 1970, he…
- Max BornMax Born shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for work he had completed nearly three decades earlier. The delay was not an oversight. It was a slow reckoning with just how much he had changed the way science thought about reality. Born…
- Yukio MishimaOn the 25th of November 1970, Yukio Mishima stepped onto a balcony at a military base in central Tokyo and shouted to the soldiers below, "Where has the spirit of the samurai gone?" The men jeered. Helicopters drowned out his words.…
- 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. When World War One broke out, that comfort turned precarious almost overnight. The…
- Adam RapackiAdam Rapacki stood before the United Nations General Assembly on the 2nd of October 1957 and proposed something that no major power had yet attempted: a nuclear-free zone carved out of the heart of Europe. He was the foreign minister of…
- Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell was born on the 18th of May 1872 in a country house called Ravenscroft, in Trellech, Monmouthshire, into one of the most prominent liberal families of the British aristocracy. He would live for 97 years, bridging the…
- Vince LombardiVince Lombardi died at 7:12 in the morning on the 3rd of September 1970, in Washington, D.C., surrounded by his wife, his parents, both of his children, and six grandchildren. He was 57. At his funeral four days later at St. Patrick's…