Curated playlist
City College of New York alumni
- Hans L. TrefousseHans Louis Trefousse spent eleven hours in Leipzig arguing with a Nazi commander who had barricaded himself and his troops inside a fortified position. When the negotiation ended, hundreds of lives had been saved. That single act of…
- Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick was born on the 26th of July 1928 in the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, and he died on the 7th of March 1999, just a few days after hosting a private screening of his final film for his family and its stars. Between those…
- 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 Martin had told them she was receiving messages from beings called the Guardians, on a…
- Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger arrived in New York City on the 5th of September, 1938, a 15-year-old Jewish refugee who had fled Germany with his family just weeks before. He had grown up in Fürth, Bavaria, watched Hitler Youth gangs beat him and his…
- David LandesDavid Saul Landes spent decades at Harvard asking a question that made many scholars uncomfortable: why did some nations grow rich while others stayed poor? Born on the 29th of April 1924, he lived long enough to watch that question travel…
- William Barrett (philosopher)William Christopher Barrett walked into City College of New York at the age of fifteen. He was not a typical freshman. He was a teenager sitting in philosophy lectures, working out ideas that most adults never bother to think through. That…
- Upton SinclairUpton Sinclair once wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." He penned that line to explain why California newspaper editors refused to take his ideas seriously.…
- Stanley WolpertStanley Albert Wolpert stepped onto the docks of Bombay on the 12th of February, 1948, as a young merchant marine engineer with little knowledge of India. Two weeks earlier, Mahatma Gandhi had been shot. What Wolpert found was a city…
- Fergus BordewichFergus M. Bordewich was born on the 1st of November, 1947, in New York City, into a world he would spend a lifetime trying to understand. His mother, LaVerne Madigan Bordewich, was the executive director of the Association on American…
- Lewis MumfordLewis Mumford was born on the 19th of October 1895 in Flushing, Queens, and spent the next nine decades becoming one of the most wide-ranging thinkers America ever produced. He never finished a college degree. Tuberculosis interrupted his…
- Bernard BaruchBernard Baruch refused. On the 25th of September, 1929, a group of financiers asked him to join a buying pool to support the falling stock market. He said no. He had already shifted his portfolio into bonds, cash, and gold. Baruch was born…
- 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 to restore as a United States Senator. That arc, from the floors of Hell's…