More on this Day - July, 19 (2024)

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103 Biographies

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Vitali Klitschko

Ukrainian boxer and politician

July 19, 1971 -

Vitali Klitschko is a Ukrainian boxer and politician whose colossal size—6 feet 7 inches (2 metres) tall and over 240 pounds (109 kg)—helped propel him to great boxing success, including the World Boxing...

James Garner

American actor

April 7, 1928 - July 19, 2014

James Garner was an American actor who was noted for his portrayal of good-natured characters and reluctant heroes. He was perhaps best known for his roles in the television series Maverick and The Rockford...

Lizzie Borden

American murder suspect

July 19, 1860 - June 1, 1927

Lizzie Borden was an American woman suspected of murdering her stepmother and father in 1892; her trial became a national sensation in the United States. Borden was the daughter of a well-to-do businessman...

Edgar Degas

French artist

July 19, 1834 - September 27, 1917

Edgar Degas was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker who was prominent in the Impressionist group and widely celebrated for his images of Parisian life. Degas’s principal subject was the human—especially...

George McGovern

United States senator

July 19, 1922 - October 21, 2012

George McGovern was an American politician who was an unsuccessful reformist Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency in 1972. He campaigned on a platform advocating an immediate end to the Vietnam...

Howard Schultz

American businessman

July 19, 1953 -

Howard Schultz is an American businessman who served as CEO (1987–2000, 2008–17, 2022– ) of Starbucks, a coffeehouse chain that he helped transform into a worldwide presence. Schultz was a communications...

Mangal Pandey

Indian soldier

July 19, 1827 - April 8, 1857

Mangal Pandey was an Indian soldier whose attack on British officers on March 29, 1857, was the first major incident of what came to be known as the Indian, or Sepoy, Mutiny (in India the uprising is often...

Florence Foster Jenkins

American singer

July 19, 1868 - November 26, 1944

Florence Foster Jenkins was an American amateur soprano, music lover, philanthropist, and socialite who gained fame for her notoriously off-pitch voice. She became a word-of-mouth sensation in the 1940s...

Samuel Colt

American inventor and manufacturer

July 19, 1814 - January 10, 1862

Samuel Colt was an American firearms inventor, manufacturer, and entrepreneur who popularized the revolver. As a teenaged seaman, Colt carved a wooden model of a revolving cylinder mechanism, and he later...

Herbert Marcuse

American philosopher

July 19, 1898 - July 29, 1979

Herbert Marcuse was a German-born American political philosopher and prominent member of the Frankfurt School of critical social analysis. His Marxist and Freudian theories of 20th-century Western society...

Syngman Rhee

president of South Korea

March 26, 1875 - July 19, 1965

Syngman Rhee was the first president of the Republic of Korea (South Korea). Rhee completed a traditional classical Confucian education and then entered a Methodist school, where he learned English. He...

Aung San

Myanmar nationalist

February 13, 1915 - July 19, 1947

Aung San was a Burmese nationalist leader and assassinated hero who was instrumental in securing Burma’s independence from Great Britain. Before World War II, Aung San was actively anti-British; he then...

Frank McCourt

American author

August 19, 1930 - July 19, 2009

Frank McCourt was an American author and teacher who was perhaps best known for the memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Frank was the first child of Irish immigrants Malachy...

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Russian poet

July 19, 1893 - April 14, 1930

Vladimir Mayakovsky was the leading poet of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the early Soviet period. Mayakovsky, whose father died while Mayakovsky was young, moved to Moscow with his mother and...

al-Bukhārī

Muslim scholar

July 19, 810 - August 31, 870

Al-Bukhārī was one of the greatest Muslim compilers and scholars of Hadith (the recorded corpus of the sayings and acts of the Prophet Muhammad). His chief work is accepted by Sunni Muslims—i.e., those...

Atom Egoyan

Canadian writer and film director

July 19, 1960 -

Atom Egoyan is an Egyptian-born Canadian writer and director who is known for his nuanced character studies of people in unconventional circ*mstances. Egoyan was born to Armenian parents in Cairo and from...

Margaret Fuller

American author and educator

May 23, 1810 - July 19, 1850

Margaret Fuller was an American critic, teacher, and woman of letters whose efforts to civilize the taste and enrich the lives of her contemporaries make her significant in the history of American culture....

Eddie Lampert

American investor

July 19, 1962 -

Eddie Lampert is an American investor who was perhaps best known for orchestrating the merger of the American retail giants Sears, Roebuck and Company and Kmart in 2005. He served as chairman of the resulting...

Alan Lomax

American music scholar

January 15, 1915 - July 19, 2002

Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, one of the most dedicated and knowledgeable folk-music scholars of the 20th century. After study at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin (B.A.,...

Agustín de Iturbide

emperor of Mexico

September 27, 1783 - July 19, 1824

Agustín de Iturbide was a Mexican caudillo (military chieftain) who became the leader of the conservative factions in the Mexican independence movement and, as Agustín I, briefly emperor of Mexico. Like...

Hans Morgenthau

German-American political scientist

February 17, 1904 - July 19, 1980

Hans Morgenthau was a German-born American political scientist and historian noted as a leading analyst of the role of power in international politics. Educated first in Germany at the Universities of...

Kgalema Motlanthe

president of South Africa

July 19, 1949 -

Kgalema Motlanthe is a South African politician who served as deputy president of South Africa (2009–14). He previously served as president of the country (2008–09) and also served as deputy president...

A.J. Cronin

British author

July 19, 1896 - January 6, 1981

A.J. Cronin was a Scottish novelist and physician whose works combining realism with social criticism won a large Anglo-American readership. Cronin was educated at the University of Glasgow and served...

Lefty Frizzell

American singer and songwriter

March 31, 1928 - July 19, 1975

Lefty Frizzell was a U.S. singer and songwriter. He was a fan of Jimmie Rodgers from childhood. Also a semiprofessional boxer (the source of his nickname), Frizzell sang in honky-tonks and on radio in...

Ilie Nastase

Romanian tennis player

July 19, 1946 -

Ilie Nastase is a Romanian tennis player known for his on-court histrionics and outstanding Davis Cup play. He was the first European to surpass $1 million in career prize money, and he was ranked number...

Cesar Pelli

American architect

October 12, 1926 - July 19, 2019

Cesar Pelli was an Argentine-born American architect who was widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s preeminent architects. After earning a bachelor’s degree in architecture at the National University...

Matthew Flinders

British navigator

March 16, 1774 - July 19, 1814

Matthew Flinders was an English navigator who charted much of the Australian coast. Flinders entered the Royal Navy in 1789 and became a navigator. In 1795 he sailed to Australia, where he explored and...

Frank Murphy

United States jurist

April 13, 1890 - July 19, 1949

Frank Murphy was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1940 until his death. He was noted for his militant defense of individual liberties and civil rights and for his insistence...

Allen Newell

American computer scientist

March 19, 1927 - July 19, 1992

Allen Newell was an American computer scientist and one of the pioneers of the science of artificial intelligence (AI). Newell and his longtime collaborator Herbert A. Simon won the 1975 A.M. Turing Award,...

Saint Seraphim of Sarov

Russian monk

July 19, 1759 - January 2, 1833

Saint Seraphim of Sarov ; canonized 1903; feast day January 2) was a Russian monk and mystic whose ascetic practice and counseling in cases of conscience won him the title starets (Russian: “spiritual...

Curzio Malaparte

Italian writer

June 9, 1898 - July 19, 1957

Curzio Malaparte was a journalist, dramatist, short-story writer, and novelist, one of the most powerful, brilliant, and controversial of the Italian writers of the fascist and post-World War II periods....

Samuel Wilberforce

English bishop

September 7, 1805 - July 19, 1873

Samuel Wilberforce was a British cleric, an Anglican prelate and educator and a defender of orthodoxy, who typified the ideal bishop of the Victorian era. He was a major figure in the preservation of the...

Thomas J. Sargent

American economist

July 19, 1943 -

Thomas J. Sargent is an American economist who, with Christopher A. Sims, was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Economics. He and Sims were honoured for their independent but complementary research on how...

Heinrich Wölfflin

Swiss historian

June 21, 1864 - July 19, 1945

Heinrich Wölfflin was a writer on aesthetics and the most important art historian of his period writing in German. Wölfflin was educated at the universities of Basel, Berlin, and Munich. His doctoral thesis,...

Rosalyn S. Yalow

American medical physicist

July 19, 1921 - May 30, 2011

Rosalyn S. Yalow was an American medical physicist and joint recipient (with Andrew V. Schally and Roger Guillemin) of the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, awarded for her development of radioimmunoassay...

Samuel Insull

American utilities magnate

November 11, 1859 - July 19, 1938

Samuel Insull was a British-born American public utilities magnate whose vast Midwest holding company empire collapsed in the 1930s. After working with one of Thomas A. Edison’s London representatives,...

Edgar Snow

American journalist

July 19, 1905 - February 15, 1972

Edgar Snow was an American journalist and author who produced the most important Western reporting on the Communist movement in China in the years before it achieved power. Snow attended the University...

John Jacob Astor

British journalist [1886-1971]

May 20, 1886 - July 19, 1971

John Jacob Astor was a British journalist and great-great-grandson of the U.S. fur magnate John Jacob Astor; as chief proprietor of The Times of London (1922–66), he maintained the newspaper’s leading...

Gottfried Keller

Swiss author

July 19, 1819 - July 16, 1890

Gottfried Keller was the greatest German-Swiss narrative writer of late 19th-century Poetischer Realismus (“Poetic Realism”). His father, a lathe artisan, died in Keller’s early childhood, but his strong-willed,...

Saint Symmachus

pope

- July 19, 514

Saint Symmachus ; feast day July 19) was the pope from 498 to 514. Apparently a Christian convert, Symmachus was an archdeacon in the Roman Church when elected to succeed Pope Anastasius II. Concurrently,...

Xu Beihong

Chinese painter

July 19, 1895 - September 26, 1953

Xu Beihong was an influential Chinese artist and art educator who, in the first half of the 20th century, argued for the reformation of Chinese art through the incorporation of lessons from the West. Xu...

Alfred Waterhouse

British architect

July 19, 1830 - September 22, 1905

Alfred Waterhouse was an English architect who worked in the style of High Victorian medieval eclecticism. He is remembered principally for his elaborately planned complexes of educational and civic buildings....

Clyde Beatty

American animal trainer

June 10, 1903 - July 19, 1965

Clyde Beatty was an American wild animal trainer known for his “fighting act,” designed to show his courage and mastery of the ferocious animals under his control. In one of the most daring acts in circus...

Mary Ann Bickerdyke

American medical worker

July 19, 1817 - November 8, 1901

Mary Ann Bickerdyke was an organizer and chief of nursing, hospital, and welfare services for the western armies under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War. Mary Ann Ball...

Teresa Edwards

American athlete and coach

July 19, 1964 -

Teresa Edwards is an American basketball player who was the most decorated player in the history of the U.S. national team. From her point-guard position, Edwards guided the U.S. national team to gold...

Edward Charles Pickering

American physicist and astronomer

July 19, 1846 - February 3, 1919

Edward Charles Pickering was a U.S. physicist and astronomer who introduced the use of the meridian photometer to measure the magnitude of stars and established the Harvard Photometry (1884), the first...

Alice Dunbar Nelson

American author

July 19, 1875 - September 18, 1935

Alice Dunbar Nelson was a novelist, poet, essayist, and critic associated with the early period of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. The daughter of a Creole seaman and a black seamstress,...

John Randall Bratby

British painter

July 19, 1928 - July 20, 1992

John Randall Bratby was a British painter who rose to prominence in the 1950s as a member of the Kitchen Sink School, a group of British social-realist artists who paralleled the literary Angry Young Men...

Dom Moraes

Indian writer

July 19, 1938 - June 2, 2004

Dom Moraes was an editor, essayist, biographer, and inveterate traveler who was one of the best-known English-language poets of India. His first book of poetry, A Beginning (1957), was published when he...

Sir Francis Knollys

English statesman

c.1514 - July 19, 1596

Sir Francis Knollys was an English statesman, loyal supporter of Queen Elizabeth I of England, and guardian of Mary, Queen of Scots, during her early imprisonment in England. Knollys entered the service...