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Columbia University alumni

  • Nur Muhammad TarakiNur Muhammad Taraki was born on the 14th of July 1917 to a peasant family in the Nawa District of Ghazni Province, in what was then the Emirate of…
  • John A. GarratyJohn Arthur Garraty was born on the 4th of July, 1920, a date that would seem almost too on-the-nose for a man who spent his career writing American history.
  • Simon P. KeefeSimon Patrick Keefe is an English musicologist, author, and Mozart expert. His official biography includes one unexpected detail: he is a life-long fan of…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • Bruria KaufmanBruria Kaufman spent five years working alongside Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, co-authoring two articles with him and…
  • Lin CarterLin Carter published his first letter in a pulp magazine in 1943, when he was thirteen years old. By the time he died in February 1988, he had written an…
  • C. Vann WoodwardC. Vann Woodward was born on the 13th of November 1908, in Vanndale, Arkansas, a small town that bore his own mother's family name and had served as a county…
  • B. R. AmbedkarB. R. Ambedkar was born on the 14th of April 1891 in the town and military cantonment of Mhow, as the 14th and last child of an army officer.
  • Henry Steel OlcottHenry Steel Olcott was born on the 2nd of August 1832 in Orange, New Jersey, the oldest of six children in a Presbyterian household.
  • 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.
  • 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…