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Francis Gary Powers
United States military officer
August 17, 1929 - August 1, 1977
Francis Gary Powers was a pilot who was captured on May 1, 1960, while on a reconnaissance flight deep inside the Soviet Union. The capture, known as the U-2 incident, resulted in the cancellation by the...
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Sam Mendes
English director
August 1, 1965 -
Sam Mendes is an English film and theatre director who is known for his innovative treatments of classic stage productions as well as for his thought-provoking films. Mendes was raised in London by his...
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Herman Melville
American author
August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, best known for his novels of the sea, including his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851). Melville’s heritage and youthful experiences were...
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Claudius
Roman emperor
August 1, 10 BCE - October 13, 54
Claudius was a Roman emperor (41–54 ce), who extended Roman rule in North Africa and made Britain a province. The son of Nero Claudius Drusus, a popular and successful Roman general, and the younger Antonia,...
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Bal Gangadhar Tilak
Indian political leader
July 23, 1856 - August 1, 1920
Bal Gangadhar Tilak was a scholar, mathematician, philosopher, and ardent nationalist who helped lay the foundation for India’s independence by building his own defiance of British rule into a national...
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Yves Saint Laurent
French designer
August 1, 1936 - June 1, 2008
Yves Saint Laurent was a French fashion designer noted for his popularization of women’s trousers for all occasions. After completing his secondary education in Oran, Algeria, Saint Laurent left for Paris...
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Calamity Jane
American frontierswoman
May 1, 1852? - August 1, 1903
Calamity Jane was a legendary American frontierswoman whose name was often linked with that of Wild Bill Hickok. The facts of her life are confused by her own inventions and by the successive stories and...
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Corazon Aquino
president of Philippines
January 25, 1933 - August 1, 2009
Corazon Aquino was a Philippine political leader who served as the first female president (1986–92) of the Philippines, restoring democratic rule in that country after the long dictatorship of Ferdinand...
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Meir Kahane
Israeli political extremist and rabbi
August 1, 1932 - November 5, 1990
Meir Kahane was an American-born Israeli political extremist and rabbi who campaigned for self-protection of Jews. The grandson and son of rabbis, Kahane joined a paramilitary, right-wing youth movement...
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Henrietta Lacks
American medical patient
August 1, 1920 - October 4, 1951
Henrietta Lacks was an American woman whose cervical cancer cells were the source of the HeLa cell line, research on which contributed to numerous important scientific advances. After her mother died in...
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Robert Todd Lincoln
American lawyer and politician
August 1, 1843 - July 26, 1926
Robert Todd Lincoln was the eldest and sole surviving child of Abraham Lincoln, who became a millionaire corporation attorney and served as U.S. secretary of war and minister to Great Britain during Republican...
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Fahd of Saudi Arabia
king of Saudi Arabia
1923 - August 1, 2005
Fahd of Saudi Arabia was the king of Saudi Arabia from 1982 to 2005. As crown prince and as an active administrator, he had been the virtual ruler during the preceding reign (1975–82) of his half brother...
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Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
French biologist
August 1, 1744 - December 18, 1829
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a pioneering French biologist who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern genetics and...
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Manuel Quezon
president of Philippines
August 19, 1878 - August 1, 1944
Manuel Quezon was a Filipino statesman, leader of the independence movement, and the first president of the Philippine Commonwealth established under U.S. tutelage in 1935. Quezon was the son of a schoolteacher...
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Muhammad Farah Aydid
Somalian faction leader
c.1930 - August 1, 1996
Muhammad Farah Aydid was a Somali faction leader. He received military training in Italy and the U.S.S.R. and served in posts under Mohamed Siad Barre (1978–89) before overthrowing him in 1991. He became...
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Hafizullah Amin
president of Afghanistan
August 1, 1929 - December 27, 1979
Hafizullah Amin was a leftist politician who briefly served as the president of Afghanistan in 1979. Amin was born into a Ghilzay Pashtun family. After graduating from Kabul University, he traveled to...
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Francis Scott Key
American lawyer
August 1, 1779 - January 11, 1843
Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer, best known as the author of the U.S. national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Key was born into an affluent family on an estate called Terra Rubra. At age...
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Cosimo de’ Medici
ruler of Florence [1389-1464]
September 27, 1389 - August 1, 1464
Cosimo de’ Medici was the founder of one of the main lines of the Medici family that ruled Florence from 1434 to 1537. The son of Giovanni di Bicci (1360–1429), Cosimo was initiated into affairs of high...
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William Clark
American explorer
August 1, 1770 - September 1, 1838
William Clark was an American frontiersman who won fame as an explorer by sharing with Meriwether Lewis the leadership of their epic expedition to the Pacific Northwest (1804–06). He later played an essential...
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Walter Ulbricht
German communist leader
June 30, 1893 - August 1, 1973
Walter Ulbricht was a German Communist leader and head of the post-World War II German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Ulbricht, a cabinetmaker by trade, joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD)...
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Bao Dai
Vietnamese emperor
October 22, 1913 - August 1, 1997
Bao Dai was the last reigning emperor of Vietnam (1926–45). The son of Emperor Khai Dinh, a vassal of the French colonial regime, and a concubine of peasant ancestry, Nguyen Vinh Thuy was educated in France...
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Publius Helvius Pertinax
Roman emperor
August 1, 126 - March 28, 193
Publius Helvius Pertinax was a Roman emperor from January to March 193. The son of a freed slave, Pertinax taught school, then entered the army, commanding units in Syria, in Britain, and on the Danube...
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Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov
Soviet biologist
August 1, 1870 - March 20, 1932
Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was a Soviet biologist who developed a method for artificially inseminating domestic animals. In 1898 Ivanov established in Moscow several zoological laboratories where he studied...
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Otto Warburg
German biochemist
October 8, 1883 - August 1, 1970
Otto Warburg was a German biochemist awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1931 for his research on cellular respiration. After earning doctorates in chemistry at the University of Berlin...
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Sviatoslav Richter
Russian musician
March 20, 1915 - August 1, 1997
Sviatoslav Richter was a Soviet pianist whose technical virtuosity, combined with subtle introspection, made him one of the preeminent pianists of the 20th century. Though his repertoire was enormous,...
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Louis VI
king of France
1081 - August 1, 1137
Louis VI was the king of France from 1108 to 1137; he brought power and dignity to the French crown by his recovery of royal authority over the independent nobles in his domains of the Île-de-France and...
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John Ross
chief of Cherokee Nation
October 3, 1790 - August 1, 1866
John Ross was a Cherokee chief who, after devoting his life to resisting U.S. seizure of his people’s lands in Georgia, was forced to assume the painful task of shepherding the Cherokees in their removal...
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Ron Brown
American politician
August 1, 1941 - April 3, 1996
Ron Brown was an American politician, the first African American to be chairman (1989–93) of a major U.S. political party and the first to be appointed secretary of commerce (1993–96). Brown’s father managed...
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Paddy Chayefsky
American playwright
January 29, 1923 - August 1, 1981
Paddy Chayefsky was an American playwright and screenwriter whose work was part of the flowering of television drama in the 1950s. He also wrote several critically acclaimed films. Chayefsky graduated...
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Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov
Soviet officer
September 14, 1900 - August 1, 1946?
Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov was an anti-Stalinist military commander who, captured by the Germans early in World War II, became a turncoat and fought with the Germans against the Soviet Union. The son of...
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Edmund of Langley, 1st duke of York
English noble
June 5, 1341 - August 1, 1402
Edmund of Langley, 1st duke of York was the fourth surviving legitimate son of King Edward III of England and founder of the House of York as a branch of the Plantagenet dynasty. Created earl of Cambridge...
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Sigismund II Augustus
king of Poland
August 1, 1520 - July 7, 1572
Sigismund II Augustus was the last Jagiellon king of Poland, who united Livonia and the duchy of Lithuania with Poland, creating a greatly expanded and legally unified kingdom. The only son of Sigismund...
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Ahmed II
Ottoman sultan
August 1, 1642 - February 6, 1695
Ahmed II was an Ottoman sultan (1691–95) whose reign was marked by the continuing war with the Holy League (Austria-Poland-Venice). Soon after his accession to the throne, Ahmed’s forces were defeated...
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Justin I
Byzantine emperor
c.450 - August 1, 527
Justin I was a Byzantine emperor (from 518) who was a champion of Christian orthodoxy; he was the uncle and predecessor of the great emperor Justinian. Born of Illyrian peasant stock, Justin was a swineherd...
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Norbert Elias
German sociologist
June 22, 1897 - August 1, 1990
Norbert Elias was a sociologist who described the growth of civilization in western Europe as a complex evolutionary process, most notably in his principal work, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (1939;...
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Israel Zangwill
British author and Zionist leader
February 14, 1864 - August 1, 1926
Israel Zangwill was a novelist, playwright, and Zionist leader, one of the earliest English interpreters of Jewish immigrant life. The son of eastern European immigrants, Zangwill grew up in London’s East...
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Theodore Roethke
American poet
May 25, 1908 - August 1, 1963
Theodore Roethke was an American poet whose verse is characterized by introspection, intense lyricism, and an abiding interest in the natural world. Roethke was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A.,...
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Maria Mitchell
American astronomer
August 1, 1818 - June 28, 1889
Maria Mitchell was the first professional woman astronomer in the United States. Mitchell was born to Quaker parents who encouraged her education. She attended schools on her native Nantucket, Massachusetts,...
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Georg Charles von Hevesy
Hungarian-Swedish chemist
August 1, 1885 - July 5, 1966
Georg Charles von Hevesy was a chemist and recipient of the 1943 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. His development of isotopic tracer techniques greatly advanced understanding of the chemical nature of life processes....
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Lorenzo Valla
Italian humanist
1407 - August 1, 1457
Lorenzo Valla was an Italian humanist, philosopher, and literary critic who attacked medieval traditions and anticipated views of the Protestant reformers. Valla was the son of a lawyer employed at the...
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William Donald Hamilton
British naturalist and population geneticist
August 1, 1936 - March 7, 2000
William Donald Hamilton was a British naturalist and population geneticist who found solutions to two of Darwin’s outstanding problems: the evolution of altruism and the evolution of sexual reproduction....
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Olaus Magnus
Swedish author
October 1490 - August 1, 1557
Olaus Magnus was a Swedish ecclesiastic and author of an influential history of Scandinavia. A Catholic priest, he went to Rome in 1523, during the Swedish Reformation, and thereafter lived in exile, first...
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Sir Frank Worrell
Jamaican athlete
August 1, 1924 - March 13, 1967
Sir Frank Worrell was an exceptional all-around cricket player and captain (1960–63) of the West Indies international team, which under his leadership achieved world cricket supremacy in the early 1960s....
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Giovanni da Pian del Carpini
Franciscan author
c.1180 - August 1, 1252
Giovanni da Pian del Carpini was a Franciscan friar, the first noteworthy European traveler in the Mongol empire, to which he was sent on a formal mission by Pope Innocent IV. He wrote the earliest important...
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St. Alphonsus Liguori
Roman Catholic priest and theologian
September 27, 1696 - August 1, 1787
St. Alphonsus Liguori ; canonized 1839; feast day August 1) was an Italian doctor of the church, one of the chief 18th-century moral theologians, and founder of the Redemptorists, a congregation dedicated...
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Edwin Austin Abbey
American painter
April 1, 1852 - August 1, 1911
Edwin Austin Abbey was an American painter and one of the foremost illustrators of his day. While working as an illustrator for the publishing house of Harper and Brothers, New York City, Abbey began to...
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Richard Kuhn
German scientist
December 3, 1900 - August 1, 1967
Richard Kuhn was a German biochemist who was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for work on carotenoids and vitamins. Forbidden by the Nazis to accept the award, he finally received his diploma...
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Georges Charpak
French physicist
August 1, 1924 - September 29, 2010
Georges Charpak was a Polish-born French physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1992 for his invention of subatomic particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber. Charpak’s...
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Kurmanbek Bakiyev
president of Kyrgyzstan
August 1, 1949 -
Kurmanbek Bakiyev is a Kyrgyz politician who served as prime minister (2000–02) and president (2005–10) of Kyrgyzstan. After graduating in 1972 from the Kuybyshev (now Samara) Polytechnic Institute in...
