Curated category
1989 deaths
- Keef CowboyRobert Keith Wiggins stood in a Bronx hallway on the 20th of September 1960. He would later become known as Keef Cowboy, but his name was just a sound to him…
- William Mann (critic)William Somervell Mann entered the world on the 14th of February 1924 in Madras, India. His father Gerald and mother Joyce Mann raised him there before…
- Bette DavisBette Davis died on the 6th of October, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, too weak to make the journey home after her cancer…
- Ferdinand MarcosFerdinand Marcos arrived in Hawaii in February 1986 with 22 crates of cash valued at $717 million, 300 crates of jewelry, and a 12 by 4 foot box full of…
- Leon FestingerLeon Festinger spent months living a lie among people who believed the world would end on the 21st of December 1954. A suburban housewife named Dorothy…
- Ruhollah KhomeiniRuhollah Khomeini died on the 3rd of June 1989, and the streets of Tehran became something the world had never quite seen before.
- Lucille BallLucille Ball was born on the 6th of August, 1911, at 69 Stewart Avenue in Jamestown, New York, and by the time she died on the 26th of April, 1989, she had…
- Salvador DalíSalvador Dalí was born on the 11th of May 1904, at 8:45 in the morning, in a house on Carrer Monturiol in the Catalan town of Figueres.
- Laurence OlivierLaurence Kerr Olivier was born on the 22nd of May 1907 in Dorking, Surrey, the youngest child of a nomadic Church of England clergyman who never quite found…
- Valentin GlushkoValentin Glushko was born on the 2nd of September 1908 in Odesa to a Ukrainian Cossack father and a Russian peasant mother.
- Samuel BeckettSamuel Beckett once described his own method as "impoverishment" - as taking away rather than adding, subtracting rather than building.
- C. L. R. JamesC. L. R. James was born on the 4th of January 1901 in Tunapuna, a small town in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony.
- Kalu RinpocheKalu Rinpoche was born in 1905 during the Female Wood Snake year of the Tibetan lunar calendar, in a remote district of Kham, Eastern Tibet.
- King TubbyKing Tubby was born Osbourne Ruddock on the 28th of January 1941 in Jamaica, and by the time he died on the 6th of February 1989, he had quietly changed the…
- HirohitoHirohito reigned over Japan for 63 years, from 1926 until his death in 1989, the longest reign of any emperor in Japanese history.
- John HicksJohn Richard Hicks was born on the 8th of April 1904 in Warwick, England, and by the time he died on the 20th of May 1989, he had reshaped the way economists…
- Osamu TezukaOsamu Tezuka spent his final hours in a Tokyo hospital bed, drawing. When a nurse tried to take his equipment away, his last words were: "I'm begging you…
- Andrei SakharovAndrei Sakharov was the man who built the Soviet Union's most devastating weapon and then spent the rest of his life trying to limit the damage it could do.
- Ronald SymeRonald Syme published The Roman Revolution in 1939, just as fascism was tightening its grip on Europe, and the book hit the scholarly world like nothing…
- A. J. AyerA. J. Ayer was 26 years old when he published a book that told most of philosophy to sit down and be quiet. Language, Truth, and Logic, which appeared in…
- Sjafruddin PrawiranegaraSjafruddin Prawiranegara kept Indonesia alive when its president and vice president were in Dutch captivity. On the 19th of December 1948, Dutch forces swept…