Hilma af Klint 1862–1944: The Painter Who Hid Abstract Art’s Future
In 2018 the Guggenheim unveiled over a thousand hidden canvases proving that Swedish artist Hilma af Klint had created fully abstract paintings years before Kandinsky or Mondrian. This episode traces ...
13 Jul 29min
The Chemist Who Was Erased - Alice Ball, 1892–1916
In the early twentieth century, a diagnosis of leprosy in Hawaii meant lifelong exile to the remote Kalaupapa peninsula. Alice Ball, a brilliant young Black chemist, cracked the chemical problem that ...
10 Jul 29min
The Architect in the Shadows: Bayard Rustin 1912–1987
On August 28, 1963, a quarter-million people marched on Washington—an event that changed the course of civil rights legislation—yet the man who made it happen remained largely invisible. Bayard Rustin...
10 Jul 30min
The Doctor Who Begged Them to Wash Their Hands: Ignaz Semmelweis, 1818–1865
In the 1840s, Vienna General Hospital ran two maternity wards with identical patients but wildly different death rates. One young doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, discovered that a simple hand-washing routin...
9 Jul 31min
Henrietta Swan Leavitt 1868–1921: The Woman Who Measured the Universe
In this episode of Obscure Lives Podcast, we uncover the remarkable story of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a deaf woman working at Harvard Observatory who discovered the key to measuring cosmic distances an...
9 Jul 30min
The Great Impostor: Ferdinand Waldo Demara 1921–1982
In 1951, aboard a Canadian destroyer off Korea, a man claiming to be surgeon-lieutenant Joseph Cyr performed life-saving surgery on wounded soldiers—despite having no medical training. That man was Fe...
8 Jul 31min
Episode 8: The Man Who Tried to End Hunger- Nikolai Vavilov, 1887–1943
# Episode 8: The Man Who Tried to End Hunger- Nikolai Vavilov, 1887–1943
23 Jun 30min
The Emperor of San Francisco: Joshua Norton 1818–1880
In 1880, thousands of San Franciscans—businessmen, laborers, and society figures—turned out to mourn Joshua Norton, a penniless eccentric who had declared himself Emperor of the United States twenty-o...
21 Jun 30min
