Curated playlist
United States Navy personnel of World War II
- John F. KennedyJohn Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade. He was 46 years old, and had served as the 35th president of the United States for less than three years. The man…
- Richard NixonRichard Nixon was the only president in American history to resign from the office he held. On the 9th of August, 1974, he stepped away from the presidency under the weight of the Watergate scandal, a crisis rooted in a break-in at the…
- Arthur E. BrysonArthur Earl Bryson Jr. was born on the 7th of October 1925, and he would come to be called the father of modern optimal control theory. That title points to mathematics that helps machines steer, settle, and decide. But the same mind…
- Kirk DouglasKirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on the 9th of December 1916, the only son among seven children in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Amsterdam, New York. His father had been a horse trader in Russia and became a ragman in…
- Johnny CarsonJohnny Carson stepped in front of a camera for the last time as host of The Tonight Show on the 22nd of May 1992, and three decades of American nights ended. For thirty years, the country had tuned in at 11:30 to watch a man from Corning,…
- John ColtraneJohn William Coltrane was born on the 23rd of September 1926, in his parents' apartment at 200 Hamlet Avenue in Hamlet, North Carolina. He died at 40, of liver cancer, on the 17th of July 1967. In the four decades that followed his death,…
- Lyndon B. JohnsonLyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States aboard Air Force One, just hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on the 22nd of November 1963. The photograph of that moment, taken…
- Alan ShepardAlan Bartlett Shepard Jr. awoke at 01:10 on the 5th of May 1961, ate a breakfast of orange juice, a filet mignon wrapped in bacon, and scrambled eggs, then climbed into a spacecraft perched atop a Redstone rocket. He had been strapped into…
- William R. LucasWilliam Ray Lucas died on the 10th of February, 2025, at his home in Huntsville, Alabama, at the age of 102. He had been Marshall Space Flight Center's fourth director, serving from 1974 to 1986. For most of his career, he was unknown…
- Chuck Cooper (basketball)Chuck Cooper stepped onto an NBA court for the first time on the 1st of November, 1950, against the Fort Wayne Pistons. That night, three men crossed a line that had been drawn for decades. Cooper, Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, and Earl Lloyd…
- Wally SchirraWally Schirra was the only astronaut to fly in all three of America's first crewed space programs: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. That distinction alone would be enough to earn him a place in history. But the full arc of his life reaches…
- Pete RozellePete Rozelle walked into a room in January 1960 and changed American sports forever. He was 33 years old, a surprise choice picked on the 23rd ballot by NFL owners who could not agree on anyone else. Most of those owners were older than…
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky once described intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. That idea alone reshaped how scientists and engineers think about minds, both human and machine. But the man who proposed it was…
- James TobinJames Tobin was born on the 5th of March, 1918, in Champaign, Illinois, the son of a journalist credited with inventing "Homecoming" at the University of Illinois. He died on the 11th of March, 2002, in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age…
- L. Sprague de Camp"My own true name sounds more like a pseudonym than most pseudonyms do," L. Sprague de Camp said, explaining why he rarely used pen names. Over a career spanning 60 years, he wrote more than 100 books. By the 1930s and 1940s he had become…
- James M. BuchananJames McGill Buchanan Jr. was born on the 3rd of October 1919 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in a farmhouse with no indoor plumbing and no electricity. The family had borrowed heavily to mechanize their farm, then lost nearly everything in…
- Joseph Francis SheaJoe Shea helped decide how America would reach the Moon. Only months into his NASA career in 1962, he worked through competing proposals for the lunar landing approach. His analysis guided the agency toward the design every Apollo mission…
- George HalasGeorge Halas was running late in 1915, and that delay saved his life. He had planned to board the SS Eastland in Chicago but was trying to put on weight for Big Ten football. He never made it to the docks. The ship capsized, killing 844…
- 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…
- Maxime FagetMaxime Allen Faget was the engineer who decided that a spacecraft returning from orbit should look nothing like an aircraft. That single, counterintuitive choice shaped every American crew vehicle that followed. Faget, whose surname is…
- Red AuerbachRed Auerbach lit a cigar on the bench while the game was still being played. It was his signal to the opposing team, to the crowd, to anyone watching: this one is over. The habit became so iconic that Boston restaurants in the 1960s posted…