#13001
Nikolai Marr
1864 - 1934 (70 years)
Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr was a Georgian-born historian and linguist who gained a reputation as a scholar of the Caucasus during the 1910s before embarking on his "Japhetic theory" on the origin of language , now considered as pseudo-scientific, and related speculative linguistic hypotheses.
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Ben Jonson
1572 - 1637 (65 years)
Benjamin Jonson was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour , Volpone, or The Fox , The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry. "He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I."
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Arthur Capell
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Arthur Capell was an Australian linguist, who made major contributions to the study of Australian languages, Austronesian languages and Papuan languages. Early life Capell was born in Newtown, New South Wales in 1902, the only child of Sarah Ann and her husband, Henry Capell. He attended North Sydney Boys' High School.
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Edward Thomas
1878 - 1917 (39 years)
Philip Edward Thomas was a British writer of poetry and prose. He is sometimes considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. He only started writing poetry at the age of 36, but by that time he had already been a prolific critic, biographer, nature writer and travel writer for two decades. In 1915, he enlisted in the British Army to fight in the First World War and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.
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Jacob Wackernagel
1853 - 1938 (85 years)
Jacob Wackernagel was a Swiss linguist, Indo-Europeanist and scholar of Sanskrit. He was born in Basel, son of the philologist Wilhelm Wackernagel . Biography Jacob Wackernagel was born on 11 December 1853 in Basel to Wilhelm Wackernagel, a Professor of German Language and Literature in Basel, and his second wife, Maria Salome . He was named after his godfather, Jacob Grimm of the Brothers Grimm. Jacob's father died when he was sixteen.
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Louis Armstrong
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Louis Daniel Armstrong , nicknamed "Satchmo", "Satch", and "Pops", was an American trumpeter and vocalist. He was among the most influential figures in jazz. His career spanned five decades and several eras in the history of jazz. He received numerous accolades including the Grammy Award for Best Male Vocal Performance for Hello, Dolly! in 1965, as well as a posthumous win for the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1972, and induction into the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame in 2017.
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Arturo Toscanini
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. He was one of the most acclaimed and influential musicians of the late 19th and early 20th century, renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his eidetic memory. He was at various times the music director of La Scala in Milan and the New York Philharmonic. Later in his career, he was appointed the first music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra , and this led to his becoming a household name, especially in the United States, through his radio and television broadcasts and many recordings of the ...
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Robert Emmet
1780 - 1803 (23 years)
Robert Emmet was an Irish Republican, orator and rebel leader. Following the suppression of the United Irish uprising in 1798, he sought to organise a renewed attempt to overthrow the British Crown and Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, and to establish a nationally representative government. Emmet entertained, but ultimately abandoned, hopes of immediate French assistance and of coordination with radical militants in Great Britain. In Ireland, many of the surviving veterans of '98 hesitated to lend their support, and his rising in Dublin in 1803 proved abortive.
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Gerhard Rohlfs
1892 - 1986 (94 years)
Gerhard Rohlfs was a German linguist. He taught Romance languages and literature at the universities in Tübingen and Munich. He was described as an "archeologist of words". Biography Rohlfs was born in Berlin-Lichterfelde. His main interest was the languages and dialects spoken in Southern Italy and he travelled extensively in this region. He studied Italiot Greek and found several indications suggesting that Italiot-Greek is a direct descendant of the language originally spoken by the Greek colonists of Magna Grecia. He first advanced this theory in his book Griechen und Romanen in Unteritalien .
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Marcel Cohen
1884 - 1974 (90 years)
Marcel Samuel Raphaël Cohen was a French linguist. He was an important scholar of Semitic languages and especially of Ethiopian languages. He studied the French language and contributed much to general linguistics.
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Priscus
410 - 471 (61 years)
Priscus of Panium was a 5th-century Eastern Roman diplomat and Greek historian and rhetorician . Biography Priscus was born in Panion between 410 and 420 AD. In 448/449 AD, he accompanied Maximinus, the head of the Byzantine embassy representing Emperor Theodosius II , on a diplomatic mission to the court of Attila the Hun. While there, he met and conversed with a Greek merchant, dressed in "Scythian" fashion, who was captured eight years earlier when the city of Viminacium was sacked by the Huns. The trader explained to Priscus that after the sack of Viminacium, he was a slave of Onegesius, a Hunnic nobleman, but obtained his freedom and chose to settle among the Huns.
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Francis Poulenc
1899 - 1963 (64 years)
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the piano suite Trois mouvements perpétuels , the ballet Les biches , the Concert champêtre for harpsichord and orchestra, the Organ Concerto , the opera Dialogues des Carmélites , and the Gloria for soprano, choir, and orchestra.
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Václav Hanka
1791 - 1861 (70 years)
Václav Hanka was a Czech philologist. Biography Hanka was born at Hořiněves near Hradec Králové. He was sent in 1807 to school at Hradec Králové, to escape the conscription, then to the University of Prague, where he founded a society for the cultivation of the Czech language. At Vienna, where he afterwards studied law, he established a Czech periodical; and in 1813 he made the acquaintance of Josef Dobrovský, an eminent philologist.
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Jerzy Kuryłowicz
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
Jerzy Kuryłowicz was a Polish linguist who studied Indo-European languages. Life Born in Stanisławów, Galicia, Austria-Hungary , Kuryłowicz was a Polish historical linguist, structuralist and language theoretician, deeply interested in the studies of Indo-European languages. He studied at the Vienna University of Economics and Business , and then, after World War I, continued his studies at Lwów University, where his unusual language skills drew the attention of some prominent linguists. As a result, he was granted a scholarship in Paris. This gave him an opportunity to qualify as a university professor of Indo-European linguistics soon after his return to Poland.
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John Bowring
1792 - 1872 (80 years)
Sir John Bowring , or Phraya Siamanukulkij Siammitrmahayot was a British political economist, traveller, writer, literary translator, polyglot and the fourth Governor of Hong Kong. He was appointed by Queen Victoria as emissary to Siam, later he was appointed by King Mongkut of Siam as ambassador to London, also making a treaty of amity with Siam on April 18, 1855, now referred to as the "Bowring Treaty". His namesake treaty was fully effective for 70 years, until the reign of Vajiravudh. This treaty was gradually edited and became completely ineffective in 1938 under the government of Plaek Phibunsongkhram.
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Heinrich Zimmer
1890 - 1943 (53 years)
Heinrich Robert Zimmer was a German Indologist and linguist, as well as a historian of South Asian art, most known for his works, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization and Philosophies of India. He was the most important German scholar in Indian Philology after Max Müller .
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Bernard Bloch
1907 - 1965 (58 years)
Bernard Bloch was an American linguist. He taught at Brown University and was Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. His father, Albert Bloch, was the only American member of Der Blaue Reiter , a group of early 20th-century European modernist painters. His brother was the film writer Walter Bloch, who also wrote under the name, Walter Black.
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Antonín Dvořák
1841 - 1904 (63 years)
Antonín Leopold Dvořák was a Czech composer. Dvořák frequently employed rhythms and other aspects of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia, following the Romantic-era nationalist example of his predecessor Bedřich Smetana. Dvořák's style has been described as "the fullest recreation of a national idiom with that of the symphonic tradition, absorbing folk influences and finding effective ways of using them."
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Constantine P. Cavafy
1863 - 1933 (70 years)
Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis , known, especially in English, as Constantine P. Cavafy and often published as C. P. Cavafy , was a Greek poet, journalist, and civil servant from Alexandria. His work, as one translator put it, "holds the historical and the erotic in a single embrace."
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Jean-Baptiste Lully
1632 - 1687 (55 years)
Jean-Baptiste Lully was an Italian naturalized French composer, guitarist, violinist, and dancer who is considered a master of the French Baroque music style. Best known for his operas, he spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV of France and became a French subject in 1661. He was a close friend of the playwright Molière, with whom he collaborated on numerous comédie-ballets, including L'Amour médecin, George Dandin ou le Mari confondu, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Psyché and his best known work, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.
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Mouloud Mammeri
1917 - 1989 (72 years)
Mouloud Mammeri was an Algerian writer, anthropologist and linguist. Biography He was born on December 28, 1917, in Ait Yenni, in Tizi Ouzou Province, French Algeria. He attended a primary school in his native village, then emigrated to Morocco to live in his uncle's house in Rabat. Four years later he returned to Algiers and pursued his studies at Bugeaud College, before continuing his education at Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, intending to join the École Normale Supérieure. Conscripted in 1939 and discharged in October 1940, Mammeri registered at the Faculté des Lettres d’Alger. Re-conscri...
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John Ford
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
John Martin Feeney , known professionally as John Ford, was an American film director. He was one of the most important and influential filmmakers of his generation. Ford made frequent use of location shooting and wide shots, in which his characters were framed against a vast, harsh, and rugged natural terrain.
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William Walker
1824 - 1860 (36 years)
William Walker was an American physician, lawyer, journalist, and mercenary. In the era of the expansion of the United States, driven by the doctrine of "manifest destiny", Walker organized unauthorized military expeditions into Mexico and Central America with the intention of establishing slave-holding colonies. Such an enterprise was known at the time as "filibustering".
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Themistius
317 - 388 (71 years)
Themistius , nicknamed Euphrades, , was a statesman, rhetorician, and philosopher. He flourished in the reigns of Constantius II, Julian, Jovian, Valens, Gratian, and Theodosius I; and he enjoyed the favour of all those emperors, notwithstanding their many differences, and the fact that he himself was not a Christian. He was admitted to the senate by Constantius in 355, and he was prefect of Constantinople in 384 on the nomination of Theodosius. Of his many works, thirty-three orations of his have come down to us, as well as various commentaries and epitomes of the works of Aristotle.
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Yip Harburg
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Edgar Yipsel Harburg was an American popular song lyricist and librettist who worked with many well-known composers. He wrote the lyrics to the standards "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" , "April in Paris", and "It's Only a Paper Moon", as well as all of the songs for the film The Wizard of Oz, including "Over the Rainbow". He was known for the social commentary of his lyrics, as well as his leftist leanings. He championed racial and gender equality and union politics. He also was an ardent critic of religion.
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Martin Joos
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Martin Joos was an American linguist and professor of German. He spent most of his career at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and also served at the University of Toronto and as a visiting scholar at the University of Alberta, the University of Belgrade, and the University of Edinburgh. During World War II, Joos was a cryptologist for the US Signal Security Agency. The War Department honored him with a Distinguished Service citation in recognition of his work developing communication systems. After the war he returned to the University of Wisconsin, eventually serving as the chairman of t...
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Darius Milhaud
1892 - 1974 (82 years)
Darius Milhaud was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and Brazilian music and make extensive use of polytonality. Milhaud is considered one of the key modernist composers. A renowned teacher, he taught many future jazz and classical composers, including Burt Bacharach, Dave Brubeck, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis among others.
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René Lévesque
1922 - 1987 (65 years)
René Lévesque was a Canadian politician and journalist who served as the 23rd premier of Quebec from 1976 to 1985. He was the first Québécois political leader since Confederation to attempt, through a referendum, to negotiate the political independence of Quebec. Starting his career as a reporter, and radio and television host, he later became known for his eminent role in Quebec's nationalization of hydro, and as an ardent defender of Quebec sovereignty. He was the founder of the Parti Québécois, and before that, a Liberal minister in the Lesage government from 1960 to 1966.
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Agop Dilâçar
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Agop Dilâçar was a Turkish-Armenian linguist who specialized in Turkic languages and the first Secretary General and head specialist of the Turkish Language Association. He created the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet and was proficient in 12 languages, and in addition to Armenian and Turkish, Dilâçar knew English, French, Greek, Spanish, Azerbaijani, Latin, German, Russian and Bulgarian.
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Wilhelm Schmidt
1868 - 1954 (86 years)
Wilhelm Schmidt SVD was a German-Austrian Catholic priest, linguist and ethnologist. He presided over the Fourth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences that was held at Vienna in 1952.
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Nicholas Poppe
1897 - 1991 (94 years)
Nicholas N. Poppe was an important Russian linguist. He is also known as Nikolaus Poppe, with his first name in its German form. He is often cited as N.N. Poppe in academic publications. Poppe was a leading specialist in the Mongolic languages and the hypothetical Altaic language family to which the Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic languages belong. Poppe was open-minded toward the inclusion of Korean in Altaic, but regarded the evidence for the inclusion of Korean as weaker than that for the inclusion of Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic.
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Walter William Skeat
1835 - 1912 (77 years)
Walter William Skeat, was a British philologist and Anglican deacon. The pre-eminent British philologist of his time, he was instrumental in developing the English language as a higher education subject in the United Kingdom.
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Charles Bean
1879 - 1968 (89 years)
Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean , usually identified as C. E. W. Bean, was a historian and one of Australia's official war correspondents. He was editor and principal author of the 12-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, and a primary advocate for establishing the Australian War Memorial .
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Henry Fairfield Osborn
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. was an American paleontologist, geologist and eugenics advocate. He was the president of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years and a cofounder of the American Eugenics Society.
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Robert R. McCormick
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Robert Rutherford "Colonel" McCormick was an American lawyer, businessman and anti-war activist. A member of the McCormick family of Chicago, McCormick became a lawyer, Republican Chicago alderman, distinguished U.S. Army officer in World War I, and eventually owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. A leading Republican and isolationist; McCormick opposed the increase in federal power brought about by the New Deal and later opposed American entry into World War II. His legacy includes what is now the McCormick Foundation philanthropic organization.
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Charles Cotton
1630 - 1687 (57 years)
Charles Cotton was an English poet and writer, best known for translating the work of Michel de Montaigne from French, for his contributions to The Compleat Angler, and for the influential The Compleat Gamester attributed to him.
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Jean-Paul Marat
1743 - 1793 (50 years)
Jean-Paul Marat was a French political theorist, physician, and scientist. A journalist and politician during the French Revolution, he was a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes, a radical voice, and published his views in pamphlets, placards and newspapers. His periodical L'Ami du peuple made him an unofficial link with the radical Jacobin group that came to power after June 1793.
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Cole Porter
1891 - 1964 (73 years)
Cole Albert Porter was an American composer and songwriter. Many of his songs became standards noted for their witty, urbane lyrics, and many of his scores found success on Broadway and in film. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, Porter defied his grandfather's wishes for him to practice law and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn to musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike many successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote the lyrics a...
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James Larkin
1876 - 1947 (71 years)
James Larkin , sometimes known as Jim Larkin or Big Jim, was an Irish republican, socialist and trade union leader. He was one of the founders of the Irish Labour Party along with James Connolly and William O'Brien, and later the founder of the Irish Worker League , as well as the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and the Workers' Union of Ireland . Along with Connolly and Jack White, he was also a founder of the Irish Citizen Army . Larkin was a leading figure in the Syndicalist movement.
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Lev Ivanov
1834 - 1901 (67 years)
Lev Ivanovich Ivanov was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer and later, Second Balletmaster of the Imperial Ballet. As a performer with the Imperial Ballet, he achieved prominence after performing as an understudy in a benefit performance of La Fille Mal Gardée. He is most famous as the choreographer of Acts II and IV of Swan Lake, which include the Dance of the Little Swans, Act II of Cinderella, and The Nutcracker, which he choreographed alongside Marius Petipa.
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Lorenzo de' Medici
1449 - 1492 (43 years)
Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici , known as Lorenzo the Magnificent , was an Italian statesman, banker, de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic, and the most powerful and enthusiastic patron of Renaissance culture in Italy. He was a magnate, diplomat, politician and patron of scholars, artists, and poets. As a patron, he is best known for his sponsorship of artists such as Botticelli and Michelangelo. He held the balance of power within the Italic League, an alliance of states that stabilized political conditions on the Italian peninsula for decades, and his life coincided with the mature phase of the Italian Renaissance and the Golden Age of Florence.
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Dmitri Shostakovich
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and was regarded throughout his life as a major composer.
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Hrachia Acharian
1876 - 1953 (77 years)
Hrachia Acharian was an Armenian linguist, lexicographer, etymologist, and philologist. An Istanbul Armenian, Acharian studied at local Armenian schools and at the Sorbonne, under Antoine Meillet, and the University of Strasbourg, under Heinrich Hübschmann. He then taught in various Armenian communities in the Russian Empire and Iran before settling in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1923, working at Yerevan State University until his death.
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Béla Bartók
1881 - 1945 (64 years)
Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became known as ethnomusicology.
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Edward Lhuyd
1660 - 1709 (49 years)
Edward Lhuyd was a Welsh naturalist, botanist, herbalist, alchemist, scientist, linguist, geographer and antiquary. He is also named in a Latinate form as Eduardus Luidius. Life Lhuyd was born in 1660, in Loppington, Shropshire, England, the illegitimate son of Edward Lloyd of Llanforda, Oswestry, and Bridget Pryse of Llansantffraid, near Talybont, Cardiganshire in 1660. His family belonged to the gentry of south-west Wales. Though well-established, the family was not wealthy. His father experimented with agriculture and industry in a manner that impinged on the new science of the day. The ...
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Gustave Boulanger
1824 - 1888 (64 years)
Gustave Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger was a French figurative painter and academic artist and teacher known for his Classical and Orientalist subjects. Education and career The Néo-Grecs and the Prix de Rome Boulanger was born in Paris in 1824. He never knew his father, and when his mother's death left him orphaned at the age of fourteen, he became the ward of his uncle, Constant Desbrosses, who in 1840 sent him to study first under the history painter Pierre-Jules Jollivet and then at the atelier of Paul Delaroche, where Boulanger met and befriended his fellow student Jean-Léon Gérôme.
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Cecil B. DeMille
1881 - 1959 (78 years)
Cecil Blount DeMille was an American filmmaker and actor. Between 1914 and 1958, he made 70 features, both silent and sound films. He is acknowledged as a founding father of American cinema and the most commercially successful producer-director in film history. His films were distinguished by their epic scale and by his cinematic showmanship. His silent films included social dramas, comedies, Westerns, farces, morality plays, and historical pageants. He was an active Freemason and member of Prince of Orange Lodge #16 in New York City.
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Theodore Sturgeon
1918 - 1985 (67 years)
Theodore Sturgeon was an American fiction author of primarily fantasy, science fiction, and horror, as well as a critic. He wrote approximately 400 reviews and more than 120 short stories, 11 novels, and several scripts for Star Trek: The Original Series.
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Hermann Osthoff
1847 - 1909 (62 years)
Hermann Osthoff was a German linguist. He was involved in Indo-European studies and the Neogrammarian school. He is known for formulating Osthoff's law, and published widely on Indo-European word-formation and morphology.
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Sergei Prokofiev
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor who later worked in the Soviet Union. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous music genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His works include such widely heard pieces as the March from The Love for Three Oranges, the suite Lieutenant Kijé, the ballet Romeo and Juliet—from which "Dance of the Knights" is taken—and Peter and the Wolf. Of the established forms and genres in which he worked, he created—excluding juvenilia—seven completed operas, seven symphonies, eight...
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