Died on Saturday, 14th March – Famous Deaths

14/03/2025

Alan Simpson, United States senator from Wyoming (born 1931)

Alan Kooi Simpson was an American politician from Wyoming. A member of the Republican Party, he served as a member of the Wyoming House of Representatives representing Park County, Wyoming from 1965 to 1977 and as a member of the United States Senate from 1979 to 1997. Simpson was Republican whip of the U.S. Senate from 1985 to 1995, serving as majority whip of the U.S. Senate from 1985 to 1987. He also served as co-chair of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform with Democratic co-chair Erskine Bowles of North Carolina.

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14/03/2022

Scott Hall, American wrestler (born 1958)

Scott Oliver Hall was an American professional wrestler. He was best known for his tenures with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) under his real name and with the World Wrestling Federation under the ring name Razor Ramon.

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14/03/2019

Jake Phelps, American skateboarder and Thrasher editor-in-chief (born 1962)

James Kendall "Jake" Phelps was an American skateboarder and magazine editor. Phelps led the magazine Thrasher as editor-in-chief for 27 years.

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Charlie Whiting, British motorsport director (born 1952)

Charles Whiting was a British mechanic. He served as the FIA Formula One Race Director, Safety Delegate, Permanent Starter and head of the F1 Technical Department, in which capacities he managed the logistics of each F1 Grand Prix, inspected cars in parc fermé before a race, enforced FIA rules, and controlled the lights that start each race.

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Haig Young, Canadian politician (born 1928)

Douglas Haig Young was a Canadian politician. He represented the electoral district of Harbour Grace in the Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly from 1972 to 1989. He was a member of the Progressive Conservative Party of Newfoundland and Labrador. He was a former Minister of Public Works of Newfoundland and Labrador. Born in Upper Island Cove, he was a funeral director and had two children.

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14/03/2018

Jim Bowen, English stand-up comedian and TV personality (born 1937)

James Brown Whittaker, known professionally as Jim Bowen, was an English stand-up comedian, actor and television personality. He was the long-time host of the ITV game show Bullseye, which he presented from its beginning in 1981 through to the end of its original run in 1995.

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Marielle Franco, Brazilian politician and human rights activist (born 1979)

Marielle Franco was a Brazilian politician, sociologist, feminist, socialist and human rights activist. Franco served as a city councillor of the Municipal Chamber of Rio de Janeiro for the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) from January 2017 until her assassination.

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Stephen Hawking, English physicist and author (born 1942)

Stephen William Hawking was an English theoretical astrophysicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Between 1979 and 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world.

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Liam O'Flynn, Irish uileann piper (born 1945)

Liam O'Flynn, Óg Flynn was an Irish uilleann piper and Irish traditional musician. In addition to a solo career and as a member of Planxty, O'Flynn recorded with: Christy Moore, Dónal Lunny, Andy Irvine, Kate Bush, Mark Knopfler, The Everly Brothers, Emmylou Harris, Mike Oldfield, Mary Black, Enya and Sinéad O'Connor.

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14/03/2016

John W. Cahn, German-American metallurgist and academic (born 1928)

John Werner Cahn was an American scientist and recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science. Born in Cologne, Weimar Germany, he was a professor in the department of metallurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1964 to 1978. From 1977, he held a position at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Cahn had a profound influence on the course of materials research during his career. One of the foremost authorities on thermodynamics, Cahn applied the basic laws of thermodynamics to describe and predict a wide range of physical phenomena.

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Peter Maxwell Davies, English composer and conductor (born 1934)

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was an English composer and conductor, who in 2004 was made Master of the Queen's Music.

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Suranimala Rajapaksha, Sri Lankan lawyer and politician (born 1949)

Rajapakse Mohottige Don Suranimala Rajapaksha was a Sri Lankan politician. Rajapaksha was first elected to the Parliament of Sri Lanka in 1994 and he was the Minister of School Education in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka from 2001 to 2004. He was a member of the United National Party (UNP) and a member of the UNP Working Committee. He was also appointed as the Coordinating secretary to the prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in 2015. At the time of his death he acted as the special envoy (representative) to the Prime Minister. His younger son Kanishka Rajapaksha was also appointed as the Coordinating Assistant to the Prime Minister after the death of Rajapaksha. Kanishka is an attorney at law.

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14/03/2014

Tony Benn, English politician, Postmaster General of the United Kingdom (born 1925)

Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, known between 1960 and 1963 as The Viscount Stansgate, was a British Labour Party politician and political activist who served as a Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bristol South East and Chesterfield for 47 of the 51 years between 1950 and 2001. He later served as President of the Stop the War Coalition from 2001 to 2014.

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Meir Har-Zion, Israeli commander (born 1934)

Meir Har-Zion was an Israeli military commando.

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14/03/2013

Jack Greene, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (born 1930)

Jack Henry Greene was an American country musician. Nicknamed the "Jolly Greene Giant" due to his height and deep voice, Greene was a long time member of the Grand Ole Opry. A three-time Grammy Award nominee, Greene is best known for his 1966 hit, "There Goes My Everything". The song dominated the country music charts for nearly two months in 1967 and earned Greene "Male Vocalist of the Year", "Single of the Year", "Album of the Year", and "Song of the Year" honors from the Country Music Association. Greene had a total of five number-one country hits and three others that reached the top 10. Billboard named Greene one of the top 100 "Most Played Artists".

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Aramais Sahakyan, Armenian poet and author (born 1936)

Aramais Sahakyan was an Armenian poet, humorist, publicist and translator.

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Ieng Sary, Vietnamese-Cambodian politician, Cambodian Minister for Foreign Affairs (born 1925)

Ieng Sary was the co-founder and a senior member of the Khmer Rouge and one of the main architects of the Cambodian genocide. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea led by Pol Pot and served in the 1975–79 government of Democratic Kampuchea as foreign minister and deputy prime minister. He was known as "Brother Number Three", as he was third in command after Pol Pot and Nuon Chea. His wife, Ieng Thirith, served in the Khmer Rouge government as social affairs minister. Ieng Sary was arrested in 2007 and was charged with crimes against humanity but died of heart failure before the case against him could be brought to a verdict.

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14/03/2012

Pierre Schoendoerffer, French director and screenwriter (born 1928)

Pierre Schoendoerffer was a French film director, a screenwriter, a writer, a war reporter, a war cameraman, a renowned First Indochina War veteran, a cinema academician. He was president of the Académie des Beaux-Arts for 2001 and for 2007.

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Ċensu Tabone, Maltese general and politician, 4th President of Malta (born 1913)

Vincent "Ċensu" Tabone, was the fourth president of Malta who also served as Minister and Nationalist MP.

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14/03/2010

Peter Graves, American actor (born 1926)

Peter Graves was an American actor who portrayed Jim Phelps in the television series Mission: Impossible from 1967 to 1973 and in its revival from 1988 to 1990. His elder brother was actor James Arness. Graves also played airline pilot Captain Clarence Oveur in the 1980 comedy film Airplane! and its 1982 sequel Airplane II: The Sequel.

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14/03/2008

Chiara Lubich, Italian activist, co-founded the Focolare Movement (born 1920)

Chiara Lubich was an Italian teacher and author who founded the Focolare Movement, which aims to bring unity among people and promote universal family.

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14/03/2007

Lucie Aubrac, French educator and activist (born 1912)

Lucie Samuel, known as Lucie Aubrac, was a member of the French Resistance in World War II. A history teacher by occupation, she earned a history agrégation in 1938, a highly uncommon achievement for a woman at that time. In 1939 she married Raymond Samuel, who took the name Aubrac in the Resistance. She was active on a number of operations, including prison breakouts. Like her husband, she was a communist militant, which she remained after the war. She sat in the Provisional Consultative Assembly in Paris from 1944 to 1945.

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14/03/2006

Lennart Meri, Estonian director and politician, 2nd President of Estonia (born 1929)

Lennart Georg Meri was an Estonian writer, film director, and statesman. He was the country's foreign minister from 1990 to 1992 and President of Estonia from 1992 to 2001.

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14/03/2003

Jack Goldstein, Canadian-American painter (born 1945)

Jack Goldstein was a Canadian born, California and New York-based performance and conceptual artist turned post-conceptual painter in the 1980s.

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Jean-Luc Lagardère, French engineer and businessman (born 1928)

Jean-Luc Lagardère was a French businessman, CEO of the Lagardère Group, one of the largest French conglomerates.

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14/03/1999

Kirk Alyn, American actor (born 1910)

Kirk Alyn was an American actor, best known for being the first actor to play the DC Comics character Superman in live-action for the 1948 movie serial Superman and its 1950 sequel Atom Man vs. Superman, as well as fellow DC Comics characters Blackhawk from the Blackhawk movie serial in 1952, and Lois Lane's father Sam Lane in 1978's Superman.

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John Broome, American author (born 1913)

John Broome, who additionally used the pseudonyms John Osgood and Edgar Ray Meritt, was an American comic book writer for DC Comics. Along with Gil Kane, he co-created the supervillain Sinestro and the Green Lantern Guy Gardner.

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14/03/1997

Fred Zinnemann, Austrian-American director and producer (born 1907)

Alfred Zinnemann was an Austrian and American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Born in Austria-Hungary and educated in France and Germany, Zinnemann began his career in Europe before emigrating to the US, where he specialized in shorts before making 25 feature films during his 50-year career. He won four Academy Awards, both for directing and producing, and made films in a variety of genres including thrillers, westerns, film noir, and stage adaptations.

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14/03/1995

William Alfred Fowler, American physicist and astronomer, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1911)

William Alfred Fowler (August 9, 1911 – March 14, 1995) was an American astrophysicist. He shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe." He is known for his theoretical and experimental research into nuclear reactions within stars and the energy elements produced in the process. With Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge and Fred Hoyle, he authored the influential B2FH paper, Synthesis of the Elements in Stars.

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14/03/1994

Sheila Humphreys, Irish Republican, political activist and Hunger Striker (born 1899)

Sheila Humphreys, also known as Sighle Humphreys, was an Irish republican and member of Cumann na mBan.

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14/03/1991

Howard Ashman, American playwright and composer (born 1950)

Howard Elliott Ashman was an American playwright, lyricist, and stage director. He is most widely known for his work on feature films for Walt Disney Animation Studios, for which Ashman wrote the lyrics and Alan Menken composed the music. Ashman has been credited as being a main driving force behind the Disney Renaissance. His work included songs for Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. He died of AIDS complications in 1991.

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14/03/1989

Zita of Bourbon-Parma, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary (born 1892)

Zita of Bourbon-Parma was the last Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, in addition to other titles. She ascended to these titles when her husband, Charles I, became the last monarch of Austria-Hungary. She was declared Servant of God by Pope Benedict XVI.

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14/03/1984

Hovhannes Shiraz, Armenian poet (born 1915)

Hovhannes Shiraz was an Armenian poet.

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14/03/1980

Mohammad Hatta, Indonesian politician, 3rd Prime Minister of Indonesia (born 1902)

Mohammad Hatta was an Indonesian statesman, nationalist, and independence activist who served as the country's first vice president as well as the third prime minister. Known as "The Proclamator", he and a number of Indonesians, including the first president of Indonesia, Sukarno, fought for the independence of Indonesia from the Netherlands. Hatta was an important figure during the Indonesian national awakening and during the national revolution. As a youth he was politically active in both the Netherlands and the Indies, which led him to be imprisoned in the Boven Digoel concentration camp for his activism. He also played a crucial role in the proclamation of Indonesian independence, being the second person to sign the declaration besides Sukarno, thus making him one of the founders of Indonesia.

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Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, Spanish environmentalist (born 1928)

Félix Samuel Rodríguez de la Fuente was a Spanish naturalist and broadcaster. He is best known for the highly successful and influential television series El Hombre y la Tierra (1974–1980). A graduate in medicine and self-taught in biology, he was a multifaceted charismatic figure whose influence has endured despite the passing years.

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14/03/1979

Frank McEncroe, Australian businessman (born 1908)

Francis Gerard McEncroe was an Australian publican, caterer, dairy farmer and food manufacturer. He is known for his invention of the Australian fast food phenomenon that became known as the Chiko Roll.

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14/03/1977

Fannie Lou Hamer, American activist and philanthropist (born 1917)

Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting and women's rights activist, community organizer, and leader of the civil rights movement. She was the vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer also organized Mississippi's Freedom Summer along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, an organization created to recruit, train, and support women of all races who sought election to government offices.

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14/03/1976

Busby Berkeley, American director and choreographer (born 1895)

Berkeley William Enos, known professionally as Busby Berkeley, was an American film director and musical choreographer, best known for his collaboration with Warner Brothers in the early to mid-1930s. Berkeley devised elaborate musical production numbers that has often involved complex geometric patterns. His work used large numbers of showgirls and props as fantasy elements in kaleidoscopic on-screen performances.

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14/03/1975

Susan Hayward, American actress (born 1917)

Susan Hayward was an American actress best known for her film portrayals of women that were based on true stories.

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14/03/1973

Howard H. Aiken, American computer scientist and engineer (born 1900)

Howard Hathaway Aiken was an American physicist and a pioneer in computing. He was the original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I, the United States' first programmable computer.

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Chic Young, American cartoonist (born 1901)

Murat Bernard "Chic" Young was an American cartoonist who created the comic strip Blondie. His 1919 William McKinley High School Yearbook cites his nickname as Chicken, source of his familiar pen name and signature. According to King Features Syndicate, Young had a daily readership of 52 million. Stan Drake, who drew Blondie in the 1980s and 1990s, stated that Young "has to go down in history as one of the geniuses of the industry."

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14/03/1969

Ben Shahn, Lithuanian-American painter, illustrator, and educator (born 1898)

Ben Shahn was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.

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14/03/1968

Erwin Panofsky, German historian and academic (born 1892)

Erwin Panofsky was a German-Jewish art historian whose work represents a high point in the modern academic study of iconography, including his hugely influential Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art and his seminal Early Netherlandish Painting.

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14/03/1965

Marion Jones Farquhar, American tennis player (born 1879)

Marion Jones Farquhar was an American tennis player. She won the women's singles titles at the 1899 and 1902 U.S. Championships. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2006.

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14/03/1957

Evagoras Pallikarides, Cypriot activist (born 1938)

Evagoras Pallikarides was a Greek-Cypriot poet and revolutionary who was a member of EOKA during the anticolonial 1955–1959 campaign against British rule in Cyprus. He was arrested on 18 December 1956 while transporting weaponry with his guerilla group, to which he confessed in his trial. He was sentenced to death by hanging, for firearms possession on 27 February 1957 and was the youngest fighter to be executed in Cyprus. His death generated widespread international condemnation due to his young age and the circumstances of his arrest.

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14/03/1953

Klement Gottwald, Czechoslovak Communist politician and 4th President of Czechoslovakia (born 1896)

Klement Gottwald was a Czech communist politician, who was the leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1929 until his death in 1953 – titled as general secretary until 1945 and as chairman from 1945 to 1953. He was the first leader of Communist Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1953.

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14/03/1941

C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, English historian (born 1887)

Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell was a British historian and academic who served as dean and later principal of Hertford College, Oxford. His field of expertise was modern European history, his most notable work being A History of the Great War, 1914–18. He is mainly remembered, however, for the vendetta pursued against him by the novelist Evelyn Waugh, in which Waugh showed his distaste for his former tutor by repeatedly using the name "Cruttwell" in his early novels and stories to depict a sequence of unsavoury or ridiculous characters. The prolonged minor humiliation thus inflicted may have contributed to Cruttwell's eventual mental breakdown.

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14/03/1937

Lars Edvard Phragmén, Swedish mathematician (born 1863)

Lars Edvard Phragmén was a Swedish mathematician who made contributions to complex analysis, voting theory, and actuarial science. He succeeded Sofia Kovalevskaia as professor of mathematical analysis at Stockholm University in 1892, where his research culminated in the development of the Phragmén–Lindelöf principle, and later served as president of the board of the Mittag-Leffler Institute. His pioneering "load-balancing" voting methods for proportional representation have experienced renewed interest in modern social choice theory and found practical application in Swedish parliamentary elections.

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14/03/1932

George Eastman, American inventor and businessman, founded Eastman Kodak (born 1854)

George Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. After a decade of experiments in photography, he patented and sold a roll film camera, making amateur photography accessible to the general public for the first time. Working as the treasurer and later president of Kodak, he oversaw the expansion of the company and the film industry.

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Frederick Jackson Turner, American historian (born 1861)

Frederick Jackson Turner was an American historian during the early 20th century, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until 1910, and then Harvard University. He was known primarily for his frontier thesis. He trained many PhDs who went on to become well-known historians. He promoted interdisciplinary and quantitative methods, often with an emphasis on the Midwestern United States.

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14/03/1930

A. A. Kannisto, Finnish politician (born 1876)

Anders Anshelm Kannisto was a Finnish trade unionist and politician who was a member of the Parliament of Finland from 1907 to 1911. A member of the Social Democratic Party, he represented Mikkeli Province. A member of the Red Guard, he was taken prisoner by the White Guard at the start of the Finnish Civil War in 1918. After the war Kannisto was sentenced to eight years in prison for treason, but was released in 1921.

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14/03/1923

Charlie Daly and three other Irish Republicans are executed by Irish Free State forces (born 1896)

Charlie Daly, born in Castlemaine, County Kerry, was the second son of Con. W. Daly, of Knockaneacoolteen, Firies, County Kerry. He went to school, first to Ballyfinnane National School, and later to the Christian Brothers at Tralee.

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14/03/1921

Bernard Ryan executed Irish republican (born 1901)

Bernard Ryan was one of six men hanged in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin on 14 March 1921. He was a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and part of the Dublin Brigade's Active Service Unit. He was one of The Forgotten Ten.

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14/03/1884

Quintino Sella, Italian economist and politician, Italian Minister of Finances (born 1827)

Quintino Sella was an Italian politician, economist and mountaineer.

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14/03/1883

Karl Marx, German philosopher and theorist (born 1818)

Karl Marx was a German philosopher, social and political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto, and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894), a critique of classical political economy which employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his life's work. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence.

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14/03/1877

Juan Manuel de Rosas, Argentinian general and politician, 17th Governor of Buenos Aires Province (born 1793)

Juan Manuel José Domingo Ortiz de Rozas y López de Osornio, nicknamed "Restorer of the Laws", was an Argentine politician and army officer who ruled Buenos Aires Province and briefly the Argentine Confederation. Born into a wealthy family, Rosas independently amassed a personal fortune, acquiring large tracts of land in the process. Rosas enlisted his workers in a private militia, as was common for rural proprietors, and took part in the disputes that led to numerous civil wars in his country. Victorious in warfare, personally influential, and with vast landholdings and a loyal private army, Rosas became a caudillo, as provincial warlords in the region were known. He eventually reached the rank of brigadier general, the highest in the Argentine Army, and became the undisputed leader of the Federalist Party.

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14/03/1860

Carl Ritter von Ghega, Italian engineer, designed the Semmering railway (born 1802)

Karl Ritter von Ghega or Karl von Ghega was an Austrian-Albanian nobleman and the designer of the Semmering Railway from Gloggnitz to Mürzzuschlag. During his time, he was the most prominent of Austrian railway engineers and architects.

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14/03/1823

Charles François Dumouriez, French general and politician, French Minister of War (born 1739)

Charles-François du Périer Dumouriez was a French military officer, minister of Foreign Affairs, minister of War in a Girondin cabinet and army general during the French Revolutionary War. Dumouriez is one of the names inscribed on the Arc de Triomphe, on Column 3.

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14/03/1811

Augustus FitzRoy, 3rd Duke of Grafton, English politician, Prime Minister of Great Britain (born 1735)

Augustus Henry FitzRoy, 3rd Duke of Grafton, styled Earl of Euston between 1747 and 1757, was a British Whig statesman of the Georgian era. He is one of a handful of dukes who have served as prime minister.

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14/03/1803

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, German poet (born 1724)

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock was a German poet. His best known works are the epic poem Der Messias and the poem Die Auferstehung, with the latter set to music in the finale of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2. One of his major contributions to German literature was to open it up to exploration outside of French models.

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14/03/1791

Johann Salomo Semler, German historian and critic (born 1725)

Johann Salomo Semler was a German church historian, biblical commentator, and critic of ecclesiastical documents and of the history of dogmas. He is sometimes known as "the father of German rationalism".

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14/03/1757

John Byng, British admiral and politician, 11th Commodore Governor of Newfoundland (born 1704)

Admiral of the Blue John Byng was a Royal Navy officer and politician who was court-martialled and executed by firing squad. After joining the navy at the age of thirteen, he participated at the Battle of Cape Passaro in 1718. Over the next thirty years he built up a reputation as a solid naval officer and received promotion to vice-admiral in 1747. He also served as Commodore-Governor of Newfoundland Colony in 1742, Commander-in-Chief, Leith, 1745 to 1746 and was a member of Parliament from 1751 until his death.

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14/03/1748

George Wade, Irish field marshal and politician (born 1673)

Field Marshal George Wade, was a British army officer and politician who served in the Nine Years' War, War of the Spanish Succession, Jacobite rising of 1715 and War of the Quadruple Alliance. He went on to be a military commander during the War of the Austrian Succession and Commander-in-Chief of the Forces during the Jacobite rising of 1745. While commanding the British Crown forces in Scotland, Wade was responsible for constructing hundreds of miles of military roads, many of which remain in use.

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14/03/1698

Claes Rålamb, Swedish statesman (born 1622)

Claes Rålamb was a Swedish statesman. In 1660 he was appointed Governor of Uppland County and in 1664 he served in the Privy Council. Between 1673 and 1678, he served as the Governor of Stockholm.

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14/03/1696

Jean Domat, French lawyer and jurist (born 1625)

Jean Domat, or Daumat was a French jurist.

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14/03/1648

Ferdinando Fairfax, 2nd Lord Fairfax of Cameron, English general and politician (born 1584)

Ferdinando Fairfax, 2nd Lord Fairfax of Cameron was an English politician and army officer who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1614 and 1648. He was a commander in the Parliamentarian army in the English Civil War. His son, Thomas Fairfax, commanded the New Model Army.

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14/03/1647

Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange (born 1584)

Frederick Henry was the sovereign prince of Orange and stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic from his older half-brother's death on 23 April 1625 until his death on 14 March 1647. In the last seven years of his life, he was also the stadtholder of Groningen (1640-1647).

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14/03/1555

John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford (born 1485)

John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford, was an English royal minister in the Tudor era. He served variously as Lord High Admiral and Lord Privy Seal. Among the lands and property he was given by Henry VIII after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, were the Abbey and town of Tavistock, and the area that is now Covent Garden. Russell is the ancestor of all subsequent Earls and Dukes of Bedford and Earls Russell, including John Russell, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1865-6), and Bertrand Russell, the philosopher (1872-1970).

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14/03/1471

Thomas Malory, English writer, the author of Le Morte d'Arthur

Sir Thomas Malory was an English writer, the author of Le Morte d'Arthur, the classic English-language chronicle of the Arthurian legend, compiled and in most cases translated from French sources. The most popular version of Le Morte d'Arthur was published by the famed London printer William Caxton in 1485. Much of Malory's life history is obscure, but he identified himself as a "knight prisoner", apparently reflecting that he was either a criminal, a prisoner-of-war, or suffering some other type of confinement. Malory's identity has never been confirmed. Since modern scholars began researching his identity the most widely accepted candidate has been Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire, who was imprisoned at various times for criminal acts and possibly also for political reasons during the Wars of the Roses. Recent work by Cecelia Lampp Linton, however, presents new evidence in support of Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers, Yorkshire.

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14/03/0968

Matilda of Ringelheim, Saxon queen (born c. 896)

Matilda of Ringelheim, also known as Saint Matilda, was a Saxon noblewoman who became queen of Germany. Her husband, Henry the Fowler, was the first king from the Ottonian dynasty, and their eldest son, Otto the Great, restored the Holy Roman Empire in 962. Matilda founded several spiritual institutions and women's convents. She was considered to be extremely pious, righteous and charitable. Matilda's two hagiographical biographies and The Deeds of the Saxons serve as authoritative sources about her life and work.

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14/03/0840

Einhard, Frankish scholar

Einhard was a Frankish scholar and courtier. Einhard was a dedicated servant of Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious; his main work is a biography of Charlemagne, the Vita Karoli Magni, "one of the most precious literary bequests of the early Middle Ages".

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