Curated playlist
1975 deaths
- Alvin HansenAlvin Harvey Hansen was born on the 23rd of August 1887 in Viborg, South Dakota, the son of a farmer. He died in 1975 having done more to shape American economic policy than perhaps any other economist of his century. Paul McCracken,…
- Hugo DysonHugo Dyson was the man who helped talk C. S. Lewis into Christianity during a long night walk on Addison's Walk at Oxford. That conversation, shared with J. R. R. Tolkien, changed the course of twentieth-century literature. Yet Dyson…
- Chiang Kai-shekChiang Kai-shek was born on the 31st of October 1887, in Xikou, a small town in Fenghua, Zhejiang, about 30 kilometers west of central Ningbo. His father died when he was eight years old. His mother, whom he later described as the…
- Francisco FrancoFrancisco Franco was shot in the abdomen in 1916, aged 23, during an assault on Moroccan positions at El Biutz, in the hills near Ceuta. The wound was so serious that he was not expected to live. His Moroccan troops took his survival as a…
- Michael FlandersMichael Henry Flanders stood six feet three inches tall, was a fine oarsman and quarter-miler, and by the time he reached Oxford his contemporaries had no doubt he would become the Olivier or Donat of his generation. His biographer and…
- Mikhail BakhtinMikhail Bakhtin spent six years working as a bookkeeper in the provincial Kazakh town of Kustanai, exiled there by the Soviet secret police. He had been arrested on the 8th of December 1928, just before the tenth anniversary of the…
- Dmitri ShostakovichDmitri Shostakovich stood backstage at the Leningrad opera house on the 26th of January 1936, white as a sheet, waiting to take his bow. Joseph Stalin had just walked out of the auditorium without speaking to anyone. The next morning,…
- Sheikh Mujibur RahmanSheikh Mujibur Rahman stood before a million people at the Ramna Race Course in Dhaka on the 7th of March 1971 and told them: "This time the struggle is for our liberation. This time the struggle is for our independence." He stopped short…
- D. P. Roy ChoudhuryDevi Prasad Roy Choudhury filled his spare hours with wrestling, flute playing, hunting and short stories, squeezed around a career in bronze and paint. Born on the 15th of June 1899, he came to be rated by many as one of the major figures…
- Theodosius DobzhanskyTheodosius Dobzhansky was born on the 25th of January 1900 in Nemirov, a small town in what was then the Russian Empire, to a mathematics teacher and his wife who had prayed to St. Theodosius of Chernigov for a child. That unusual name…