Curated playlist
1976 deaths
- Benjamin BrittenBenjamin Britten was born on the 22nd of November 1913 in the fishing port of Lowestoft, Suffolk, and that birth date is no accident: it fell on the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. By the time he died on the 4th of…
- Max ErnstMax Ernst died on the 1st of August 1914. That, at least, was how he described it. In his autobiography, he wrote: "On the first of August 1914 M.E. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918." Those dates bracket the four…
- Agatha ChristieAgatha Christie holds a record no living novelist can claim: more than two billion copies of her books sold, making her the best-selling fiction writer of all time. She wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, and her…
- Martin HeideggerMartin Heidegger was born on the 26th of September 1889 in rural Meßkirch, Baden, the son of a village church sexton. He died in his sleep in Freiburg on the 26th of May 1976, and was buried two days later in his birthplace, beside his…
- Milton WaldmanMilton Waldman entered the world in 1895 within the city limits of Cleveland, Ohio. His early education took place at Yale University before he joined the United States Army during the First World War. This military service shaped his…
- Mao ZedongMao Zedong was born to a peasant family in Shaoshan, a village in Hunan, on the 26th of December 1893, near the end of the Qing dynasty. His father beat him. The boy refused the wife his father chose. He read forbidden novels instead of…
- Stith ThompsonStith Thompson was born in Bloomfield, Nelson County, Kentucky on the 7th of March 1885. He grew up as the son of John Warden and Eliza McClaskey. His family moved to Indianapolis when he turned twelve years old. This shift placed him near…
- Zhou EnlaiZhou Enlai stood at the center of Chinese history for more than half a century, serving as the first Premier of the People's Republic of China from October 1949 until his death on the 8th of January 1976. He was born on the 5th of March…
- Werner HeisenbergWerner Heisenberg was born on the 5th of December 1901 in Würzburg, Germany, the son of a secondary school teacher who would become Germany's only ordinarius professor of medieval and modern Greek studies. That background in language and…
- Rudolf BultmannRudolf Bultmann once told his students that it did not matter what happened throughout Jesus's life. To Bultmann, only that Jesus existed, preached, and died by crucifixion mattered. He called this the difference between the "thatness" and…
- Raymond QueneauRaymond Queneau once calculated that a reader working through his book A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, around the clock every day without stopping, would need 190,258,751 years to finish it. That number is not a joke. It is not a…
- Trofim LysenkoTrofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist born on the 29th of September 1898 in the village of Karlovka, managed to hijack the entire field of Soviet biology for more than three decades. He was not a polished academic. He had only learned to…