Curated category
20th-century Roman Catholics
- Alfred HitchcockAlfred Hitchcock was born on the 13th of August 1899 above a greengrocer's shop at 517 High Road in Leytonstone, Essex. By the time he died in 1980, his…
- John F. KennedyJohn Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade.
- F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald sold fewer than 23,000 copies of The Great Gatsby in its first year, and the novel posted tepid sales for the rest of his life.
- Frank SinatraFrancis Albert Sinatra weighed 13.5 pounds when he was born on the 12th of December 1915, in a tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey.
- J. R. R. TolkienOn the evening of his 21st birthday, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien sat down and wrote a letter to a young woman named Edith Mary Bratt.
- Kobe BryantKobe Bean Bryant scored 81 points on the 22nd of January, 2006, the second-highest total in a single NBA game in the history of the sport.
- Stephen ColbertStephen Colbert walked to the podium at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, stood a few yards from President George W.
- Gonzague de ReynoldGonzague de Reynold entered the world on the 15th of June 1880 inside his family's sixteenth-century chateau in Cressier.
- 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…
- Lionel MessiLionel Andrés Messi was born on the 24th of June 1987 in Rosario, a city in the Santa Fe Province of Argentina. By the time he was ten years old, doctors had…
- AaliyahAaliyah Dana Haughton was 22 years old when a twin-engine Cessna 402 lifted off a runway in the Bahamas on the evening of the 25th of August 2001, and then…
- Ryan ReynoldsRyan Rodney Reynolds chose not to get paid for Deadpool to make sure the film would actually get made. That detail, small as it sounds, tells you almost…
- Ronaldo (Brazilian footballer)Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima scored five goals for Cruzeiro in a single game against Bahia on the 7th of November 1993. He was 17 years old.
- Konrad AdenauerKonrad Adenauer was elected the first chancellor of West Germany on the 15th of September 1949 by what observers called a majority of one vote, his own.
- Sepp BlatterSepp Blatter ran world football for seventeen years, and by the time he left, he had been banned, investigated by two countries, and accused of everything…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann once told a colleague that the second incompleteness theorem had struck a harder blow to mathematics than even its discoverer believed.
- Joseph CampbellJoseph Campbell once told a packed lecture hall that if you follow your bliss, a track that has been there all the while will open up beneath your feet.
- 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.
- Cristiano RonaldoCristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro was born on the 5th of February 1985 in the São Pedro parish of Funchal, the capital of the Portuguese island of Madeira.
- Padraic ColumPadraic Colum entered the world on the 8th of December 1881 inside a County Longford workhouse. His father worked there as an employee while his mother Susan…
- Vincent CroninVincent Archibald Patrick Cronin entered the world on the 24th of May 1924 in Tredegar, Monmouthshire. His father was A.J.
- Daniel Patrick MoynihanDaniel Patrick Moynihan shined shoes at Pennsylvania Station as a boy during the Great Depression, in the same building he would later spend decades fighting…
- Peter DebyePeter Debye was born in Maastricht in the Netherlands on the 24th of March 1884, and by the time he died on the 2nd of November 1966, his name had been…
- Gabriel BatistutaGabriel Omar Batistuta was born on the 1st of February 1969 in the Argentine town of Avellaneda, to a slaughterhouse worker and a school secretary.