List of Famous people who died in 1996

Merle Eugene Curti was a leading American historian, who taught many graduate students at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin, and was a leader in developing the fields of social history and intellectual history. He directed 86 finished Ph.D. dissertations and had an unusually wide range of correspondents. As a Progressive historian he was deeply committed to democracy, and to the Turnerian thesis that social and economic forces shape American life, thought and character. He was a pioneer in peace studies, intellectual history, and social history, and helped develop quantitative methods based on census samples as a tool in historical research.

Thomas George Dimitroff was an American gridiron football player and coach.

Helmut Heißenbüttel was a German novelist and poet. Among Heißenbüttel's works are Das Textbuch and Marlowe's Ende. He received the important Georg Büchner Prize in 1969. His other awards include the Bundesverdienstkreuz Erster Klasse (1979) and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1990).

Bert Fortell (1924-1996) was an Austrian actor.

Henri Nannen was a German journalist and wartime Nazi propagandist. He became one of the most prominent journalists and magazine publishers in Germany.

Henry Jay Lewis was an American double-bassist and orchestral conductor whose career extended over four decades. A child prodigy, he joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic at age 16, becoming the first African-American instrumentalist in a major symphony orchestra and, later, the first African-American symphony orchestra conductor in the United States. As musical director of the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra, he supported America's cultural diplomacy initiatives in Europe after World War II.

Joseph Louis Bernardin was an American Cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Cincinnati from 1972 until 1982, and as Archbishop of Chicago from 1982 until his death in 1996 from pancreatic cancer. Bernardin was elevated to the cardinalate in 1983 by Pope John Paul II.

Ernest Charles Manning,, a Canadian politician, was the eighth premier of Alberta between 1943 and 1968 for the Social Credit Party of Alberta. He served longer than any other premier in the province's history and was the second longest serving provincial premier in Canadian history. He was also the only member of the Social Credit Party of Canada to sit in the Senate and, with the party shut out of the House of Commons in 1980, was its last representative in Parliament when he retired from the Senate in 1983.