Centuries: 19th century - 20th century - 21st century

Decades: 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s - 1940s - 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s

Years: 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 - 1945 - 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950

Events

• World War II ends
• United Nations formed
• U.S. drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Births

• January 3 - Stephen Stills (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young), singer, songwriter
• January 3 - Victoria Principal, actress
• January 10 - Rod Stewart, singer
• January 19 - Maria Jespen, theologian
• January 26 - Jacqueline du Pré, cello player (d. 1987)
• January 27 - Nick Mason, musician of Pink Floyd
• January 28 - Marthe Keller, actress
• January 29 - Tom Selleck, actor (Magnum, P.I.)
• January 30 - Michael Dorris, author (d. 1997)
• February 3 - Bob Griese, Football Hall of Famer
• February 5 - Charlotte Rampling, actress
• February 6 - Bob Marley, Jamaican roots rock reggae singer and musician (d. 1981)
• February 7 - Pete Postlethwaite, actor
• February 9 - Mia Farrow, actress
• February 14 - Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein
• February 17 - Brenda Fricker, actress
• February 24 - Barry Bostwick, actor
• February 28 - Bubba Smith, Football Hall of Famer
• March 7 - John Heard, actor
• March 8 - Micky Dolenz, actor, director, musica ("The Monkees")
• March 8 - Anselm Kiefer, painter
• March 19 - Cem Karaca, Turkish rock musician
• March 22 - Paul Schockemöhle, equestrian
• March 29 - Walt Frazier, basketball player
• March 30 - Eric Clapton, blues guitarist
• April 2 - Linda Hunt, actress
• April 4 - Daniel Cohn-Bendit, political activist
• April 4 - Craig T. Nelson, actor "Coach" "The District"
• April 27 - August Wilson, playwright
• May 4 - Narasinham Ram, journalist
• May 6 - Bob Seger, rock music singer
• May 6 - Jimmie Dale Gilmore, musician
• May 8 - Keith Jarrett, jazz musician
• May 13 - Magic Dick, musician ("The J. Geils Band")
• May 15 - Duarte Pio, Duke of Braganza presumptive heir to Portuguese crown
• May 19 - Pete Townshend, guitarist, lyricist
• May 21 - Ernst Messerschmid, physicist and astronaut
• May 28 - John Fogerty, singer
• May 31 - Rainer Werner Fassbinder, director
• June 15 - Her Royal Highness Princess Michael of Kent
• June 17 - Art Bell - radio talk show host
• June 17 - Eddy Merckx, Belgian cycling champion
• June 17 - Anupam Kher, actor, India
• June 19 - Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar poet, politician and Nobel peace laureate
• June 25 - Carly Simon, singer, songwriter
• July 7 - Michael Ancram (Michael Kerr, Earl of Ancram), British politician
• July 8 - Micheline Calmy-Rey, member of the Swiss Federal Council
• July 15 - Jürgen Möllemann, German politician (d. 2003)
• July 28 - Jim Davis, cartoonist
• August 14 - Steve Martin, actor and comedian
• August 31 - Itzhak Perlman, violinist
• August 31 - Van Morrison, musician
• September 3 - Aldo Moro, Italian politician
• September 8 - Jose Feliciano, singer
• October 12 - Aurore Clément, French actress
• October 15 - Jim Palmer, Baseball Hall of Famer
• October 27 - Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazilian President
• October 30 - Henry Winkler, actor (Happy Days)
• November 3 - J. D. Souther, country rock musician
• November 5 - Jacques Lanctôt, FLQ terrorist
• November 12 - Neil Young, (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young), singer, songwriter
• November 26 - Daniel Davis, actor (The Nanny)

Deaths

• January 3 - Edgar Cayce, psychic, "exhaustion"
• January 22 - Else Lasker-Schuler, poet
• January 31 - Eddie Slovik, American soldier
• February 5 - Lilian Rolfe, SOE agent executed by the Nazis
• February 5 - Violette Szabo, SOE agent executed by the Nazis
• February 5 - Denise Bloch, SOE agent executed by the Nazis
• February 11 - Al Dubin, Swiss songwriter
• February 11 - J. S. H. Lokerman, Dutch resistance fighter
• February 17 - Gabrielle Weidner, Belgian heroine of World War II
• February 21 - Eric Liddell, Scottish runner
• March - Anne Frank, at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, typhus
• March 2 - Emily Carr, artist
• March 18 - William Grover-Williams, Grand Prix motor racing driver/war hero
• March 19 - Friedrich Fromm, Nazi official
• March 23 - Elisabeth de Rothschild, executed by the Nazis
• March 26 - David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• March 30 - Elise Rivet, Roman Catholic nun and war hero
• April 9 - Wilhelm Canaris, head of the German Abwehr, hanged for treason
• April 9 - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian in Nazi Germany
• April 12 - United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, massive stroke
• April 18 - Ernie Pyle, American journalist, sniper fire
• April 28 - Benito Mussolini, Italian dictator, hanged
• April 30 - Adolf Hitler, German dictator and Nazi party leader, suicide
• May 1 - Cecily Lefort SOE agent, WW II heroine, executed by the Nazis
• May 1 - Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propagandist, suicide
• May 15 - Charles Williams, British author
• May 23 - Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi Gestapo, suicide
• July 5 - John Curtin, fourteenth Prime Minister of Australia
• August 2 - Pietro Mascagni, Italian composer
• August 9 - Harry Hillman, American athlete
• August 10 - Robert Goddard, American rocket scientist
• August 31 - Stefan Banach, Polish mathematician
• September 15 - Anton Webern, Austrian composer
• September 24 - Johannes Hans Geiger, inventor of the Geiger counter
• September 26 - Béla Bartók, aged 64, Hungarian composer
• October 13 - Milton Hershey, chocolate tycoon
• October 15 - Pierre Laval, former Vichy French premier, firing squad
• October 19 - N.C. Wyeth, illustrator
• October 24 - Vidkun Quisling, Norwegian politician, famous traitor, executed
• November 11 - Jerome Kern, composer
• November 21 - Robert Benchley, The New Yorker, humorist, theatre critic, actor
• December 4 - Thomas Hunt Morgan, biologist
• December 20 - General George S. Patton, car accident
• December 28 - Theodore Dreiser, author

Nobel Prizes

• Nobel Prize in Physics - Wolfgang Pauli
• Chemistry - Artturi Ilmari Virtanen
• Medicine - Sir Alexander Fleming, Ernst Boris Chain, Sir Howard Walter Florey
• Literature - Gabriela Mistral
• Peace - Cordell Hull

New Books

• The Age of Jackson - Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
• The Age of Reason - Jean-Paul Sartre
• Animal Farm - George Orwell
• Black Boy - Richard Wright
• The Black Rose - Thomas B. Costain
• Bonheur d'occasion (The Tin Flute) - Gabrielle Roy
• The Bosnian Trilogy - Ivo Andric
• Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
• By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept - Elizabeth Smart
• Cannery Row - John Steinbeck
• The Egyptian - Mika Waltari
• Gigi - Colette
• High Ground - Odella Phelps Wood
• Loving - Henry Green
• Night Has a Thousand Eyes - Cornell Woolrich
• The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
• The Open Society and Its Enemies - Karl Popper
• The Policy King - Lewis A. H. Caldwell
• The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford
• Rabbit Hill - Robert Lawson
• A Street in Bronzeville - Gwendolyn Brooks
• Stuart Little - E.B. White
• Surrender on Demand - Varian Fry
• That Hideous Strength - C. S. Lewis
• The Thurber Carnival (anthology) - James Thurber
• Tootle - Gertrude Crampton
• Two Solitudes - Hugh MacLennan
• The Wide House - Taylor Caldwell

1945

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