Biographies on This Day in History: July 28
Born On
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
militant leader
July 28, 1971 - October 26, 2019 and October 27, 2019
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS]) from 2010 to 2019. The details of Baghdadi’s life remain uncertain or...
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Johann Sebastian Bach
German composer
March 21, 1685 - July 28, 1750
Johann Sebastian Bach, composer of the Baroque era, the most celebrated member of a large family of north German musicians. Although he was admired by his contemporaries primarily as an outstanding harpsichordist,...
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Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
American first lady
July 28, 1929 - May 19, 1994
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, American first lady (1961–63), who was the wife of John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, and was noted for her style and elegance. Her second husband, Aristotle...
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Hugo Chávez
president of Venezuela
July 28, 1954 - March 5, 2013
Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan politician who was president of Venezuela (1999–2013). Chávez styled himself as the leader of the “Bolivarian Revolution,” a socialist political program for much of Latin America,...
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Maximilien Robespierre
French revolutionary
May 6, 1758 - July 28, 1794
Maximilien Robespierre, radical Jacobin leader and one of the principal figures in the French Revolution. In the latter months of 1793 he came to dominate the Committee of Public Safety, the principal...
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Thomas Cromwell
English statesman
c.1485 - July 28, 1540
Thomas Cromwell, principal adviser (1532–40) to England’s Henry VIII, chiefly responsible for establishing the Reformation in England, for the dissolution of the monasteries, and for strengthening the...
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Marcel Duchamp
French artist
July 28, 1887 - October 2, 1968
Marcel Duchamp, French artist who broke down the boundaries between works of art and everyday objects. After the sensation caused by Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), he painted few other pictures....
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Antonio Vivaldi
Italian composer
March 4, 1678 - July 28, 1741
Antonio Vivaldi, Italian composer and violinist who left a decisive mark on the form of the concerto and the style of late Baroque instrumental music. Vivaldi’s main teacher was probably his father, Giovanni...
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Karl Popper
British philosopher
July 28, 1902 - September 17, 1994
Karl Popper, Austrian-born British philosopher of natural and social science who subscribed to anti-determinist metaphysics, believing that knowledge evolves from experience of the mind. Although his first...
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Robert Hooke
British scientist
July 28, 1635 - March 3, 1703
Robert Hooke, English physicist who discovered the law of elasticity, known as Hooke’s law, and who did research in a remarkable variety of fields. In 1655 Hooke was employed by Robert Boyle to construct...
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Beatrix Potter
British author
July 28, 1866 - December 22, 1943
Beatrix Potter, English author of children’s books, who created Peter Rabbit, Jeremy Fisher, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, and other animal characters. Potter, the only daughter of heirs to cotton...
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Terry Fox
Canadian activist
July 28, 1958 - June 28, 1981
Terry Fox, Canadian activist who became a national hero and an inspirational figure for his battle against cancer. Through his Marathon of Hope event, a race across Canada, he raised millions of dollars...
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Francis Crick
British biophysicist
June 8, 1916 - July 28, 2004
Francis Crick, British biophysicist, who, with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, received the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their determination of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic...
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Alberto Fujimori
president of Peru
July 28, 1938 -
Alberto Fujimori, Peruvian politician, president of Peru from 1990 to 2000. Fujimori, the son of Japanese immigrants, earned a degree in agronomic engineering from the National Agrarian University in Lima...
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Santiago Calatrava
Spanish architect
July 28, 1951 -
Santiago Calatrava, Spanish architect widely known for his sculptural bridges and buildings. Calatrava studied architecture at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, from which he graduated in...
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Alexis Tsipras
prime minister of Greece
July 28, 1974 -
Alexis Tsipras, Greek politician and leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) who became prime minister of Greece in January 2015. Tsipras rode into office on a wave of popular opposition to...
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Bill Bradley
United States senator and athlete
July 28, 1943 -
Bill Bradley, collegiate and professional basketball player who later served as a U.S. senator. Bradley began to play basketball at age nine and became one of the best players in Missouri high school basketball...
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Otto Hahn
German chemist
March 8, 1879 - July 28, 1968
Otto Hahn, German chemist who, with the radiochemist Fritz Strassmann, is credited with the discovery of nuclear fission. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944 and shared the Enrico Fermi...
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Joseph Bonaparte
king of Spain and Naples
January 7, 1768 - July 28, 1844
Joseph Bonaparte, lawyer, diplomat, soldier, and Napoleon I’s eldest surviving brother, who was successively king of Naples (1806–08) and king of Spain (1808–13). Like his brothers, Joseph embraced the...
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Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac
French author
March 6, 1619 - July 28, 1655
Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, French satirist and dramatist whose works combining political satire and science-fantasy inspired a number of later writers. He has been the basis of many romantic but unhistorical...
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Woody Strode
American actor and athlete
July 28, 1914 - December 31, 1994
Woody Strode, American character actor who was part of director John Ford’s "family" of actors, appearing in nearly a dozen of Ford’s films. Strode also had a brief career as a professional gridiron football...
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Ibn al-ʿArabī
Muslim mystic
July 28, 1165 - November 16, 1240
Ibn al-ʿArabī, celebrated Muslim mystic-philosopher who gave the esoteric, mystical dimension of Islamic thought its first full-fledged philosophic expression. His major works are the monumental Al-Futūḥāt...
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Gerard Manley Hopkins
British poet
July 28, 1844 - June 8, 1889
Gerard Manley Hopkins, English poet and Jesuit priest, one of the most individual of Victorian writers. His work was not published in collected form until 1918, but it influenced many leading 20th-century...
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Lucy Burns
American suffragist
July 28, 1879 - December 22, 1966
Lucy Burns, American suffragist whose zealous political organizing and militant tactics helped forge support for a federal constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. Burns was the fourth...
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Frank Loesser
American composer and lyricist
June 29, 1910 - July 28, 1969
Frank Loesser, American composer, librettist, and lyricist, who achieved major success writing for Broadway musicals, culminating in the 1962 Pulitzer Prize-winning How to Succeed in Business Without Really...
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John Walker
American spy
July 28, 1937 - August 28, 2014
John Walker, U.S. Navy communications specialist who for almost two decades (1967–85) passed classified documents, including navy code books and reports on movements of submarines and surface ships, to...
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Sir Garfield Sobers
West Indian cricketer
July 28, 1936 -
Sir Garfield Sobers, West Indian cricketer, considered by many authorities the most gifted all-around player of all time. As a batsman, he established a record for Test (international) matches by scoring...
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John Peter Zenger
American printer
1697 - July 28, 1746
John Peter Zenger, New York printer and journalist whose famous acquittal in a libel suit (1735) established the first important victory for freedom of the press in the English colonies of North America....
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Robert Hughes
Australian art critic and television personality
July 28, 1938 - August 6, 2012
Robert Hughes, Australian art critic and television personality known for his informed and highly opinionated criticism and his accessible and succinct writing style. After graduating (1956) from St. Ignatius...
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Louis de Saint-Just
French revolutionary
August 25, 1767 - July 28, 1794
Louis de Saint-Just, controversial ideologue of the French Revolution, one of the most zealous advocates of the Reign of Terror (1793–94), who was arrested and guillotined in the Thermidorian Reaction....
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Ludwig Feuerbach
German philosopher
July 28, 1804 - September 13, 1872
Ludwig Feuerbach, German philosopher and moralist remembered for his influence on Karl Marx and for his humanistic theologizing. The fourth son of the eminent jurist Paul von Feuerbach, Ludwig Feuerbach...
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Theodosius II
Roman emperor
April 10, 401 - July 28, 450
Theodosius II, Eastern Roman emperor from 408 to 450. He was a gentle, scholarly, easily dominated man who allowed his government to be run by a succession of relatives and ministers. The son of the Eastern...
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Rudy Vallee
American singer
July 28, 1901 - July 3, 1986
Rudy Vallee, one of the most-popular American singers of the 1920s and ’30s and a film and stage star in the decades that followed. His collegiate style as a singing bandleader made him known across the...
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Riccardo Muti
Italian conductor
July 28, 1941 -
Riccardo Muti, Italian conductor of both opera and the symphonic repertory. He became one of the most respected and charismatic conductors of his generation. As a child, Muti studied piano at the conservatory...
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Jacques Piccard
Swiss oceanic engineer
July 28, 1922 - November 1, 2008
Jacques Piccard, Swiss oceanic engineer, economist, and physicist, who helped his father, Auguste Piccard, build the bathyscaphe for deep-sea exploration and who also invented the mesoscaphe, an undersea...
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John Ashbery
American poet
July 28, 1927 - September 3, 2017
John Ashbery, American poet noted for the elegance, originality, and obscurity of his poetry. Ashbery graduated from Harvard University in 1949 and received a master’s degree from Columbia University in...
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Marie Dressler
Canadian actress
November 9, 1868 - July 28, 1934
Marie Dressler, Canadian-born comedian and singer who achieved her greatest success toward the end of her life. Dressler was the daughter of a piano teacher and early in life discovered her ability to...
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Michael Mukasey
United States attorney general
July 28, 1941 -
Michael Mukasey, American lawyer and judge who served as attorney general of the United States (2007–09). Mukasey attended Columbia University (B.A., 1963) and Yale Law School (J.D., 1967). After working...
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Charles Hard Townes
American physicist
July 28, 1915 - January 27, 2015
Charles Hard Townes, American physicist, joint winner (with the Soviet physicists Aleksandr M. Prokhorov and Nikolay G. Basov) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1964 for his role in the invention of the...
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Ernst Cassirer
German philosopher
July 28, 1874 - April 13, 1945
Ernst Cassirer, German Jewish philosopher, educator, and prolific writer, remembered for his interpretation and analysis of cultural values. Educated in German universities, Cassirer was strongly influenced...
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Sir Flinders Petrie
British archaeologist
June 3, 1853 - July 28, 1942
Sir Flinders Petrie, British archaeologist and Egyptologist who made valuable contributions to the techniques and methods of field excavation and invented a sequence dating method that made possible the...
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Sir Moses Montefiore, Baronet
British philanthropist
October 24, 1784 - July 28, 1885
Sir Moses Montefiore, Baronet, Italian-born businessman who was noted for his philanthropy and support of Jewish rights. Scion of an old Italian Jewish merchant family, Montefiore was taken to England...
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Malcolm Lowry
British novelist
July 28, 1909 - June 27, 1957
Malcolm Lowry, English novelist, short-story writer, and poet whose masterwork was Under the Volcano (1947; reissued 1962). It was begun in 1936 and is redolent of that period, when the world itself seemed...
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Edward Drinker Cope
American paleontologist
July 28, 1840 - April 12, 1897
Edward Drinker Cope, paleontologist who discovered approximately a thousand species of extinct vertebrates in the United States and led a revival of Lamarckian evolutionary theory, based largely on paleontological...
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Charles Albert
king of Sardinia-Piedmont
October 2, 1798 - July 28, 1849
Charles Albert, king of Sardinia–Piedmont (1831–49) during the turbulent period of the Risorgimento, the movement for the unification of Italy. His political vacillations make him an enigmatic personality....
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Gerd Faltings
German mathematician
July 28, 1954 -
Gerd Faltings, German mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1986 for his work in algebraic geometry. Faltings attended the Westphalian Wilhelm University of Münster (Ph.D., 1978). Following...
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Gaspard Monge, count de Péluse
French mathematician and public official
May 10, 1746 - July 28, 1818
Gaspard Monge, count de Péluse, French mathematician who invented descriptive geometry, the study of the mathematical principles of representing three-dimensional objects in a two-dimensional plane; no...
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Albert Namatjira
Australian painter
July 28, 1902 - August 8, 1959
Albert Namatjira, Australian Aboriginal painter noted for his watercolour landscapes of desertlike central Australia. A member of the Aranda people, Namatjira attended a Lutheran mission school, was taught...
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John George Lambton, 1st earl of Durham
British statesman
April 12, 1792 - July 28, 1840
John George Lambton, 1st earl of Durham, British reformist Whig statesman sometimes known as “Radical Jack,” governor-general and lord high commissioner of Canada, and nominal author of the Report on the...
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Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov
Soviet physicist
July 28, 1904 - January 6, 1990
Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov, Soviet physicist who shared the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physics with fellow Soviet scientists Igor Y. Tamm and Ilya M. Frank for the discovery and theoretical interpretation...