Herbert Howells (1892-1983)
Shinichi Suzuki (1898-1998)
Rolando Panerai (1924)
Reiner Goldberg (1939)
Stephen Kovacevich (1940)
and
Georg Büchner (1813-1837)
Nathanael West (1903-1940)
Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
and from the Composers Datebook:
On this day in 1978, President Jimmy Carter presents the Congressional Medal of Honor to singer Marian Anderson.
and from The Writer's Almanac:
It was on this day in 1933 that Albert Einstein officially moved to the
United States to teach at Princeton University. He had been in
California working as a visiting professor when Hitler took over as
chancellor of Germany. Einstein’s apartment in Berlin and his summer
cottage in the country were raided, his papers confiscated, and his bank
accounts closed. He returned to Europe and handed in his German
passport, renouncing his citizenship. He considered offers from all over
the world, including Paris, Turkey, and Oxford. Einstein eventually
decided on Princeton, which offered him an attractive package teaching
at its Institute for Advanced Study — but he had his hesitations about
the university. For one thing, it had a clandestine quota system in
place that only allowed a small percentage of the incoming class to be
Jewish. The Institute’s director, Abraham Flexner, was worried that
Einstein would be too directly involved in Jewish refugee causes, so he
micromanaged Einstein’s public appearances, keeping him out of the
public eye when possible. He even declined an invitation for Einstein to
see President Roosevelt at the White House without telling the
scientist. When Einstein found out, he personally called Eleanor
Roosevelt and arranged for a visit anyway, and then complained about the
incident in a letter to a rabbi friend of his, giving the return
address as “Concentration Camp, Princeton.” In 1938, incoming freshmen
at Princeton ranked Einstein as the second-greatest living person; first
place went to Adolf Hitler.
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