The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#14751
Chris Wood
1944 - 1983 (39 years)
Christopher Gordon Blandford Wood was a British rock musician, best known as a founding member of the rock band Traffic, along with Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi and Dave Mason. Career Born in Quinton, a suburb of Birmingham, Chris Wood had an interest in music and painting from early childhood. Self-taught on flute and saxophone, which he began playing at the age of 15, he began to play locally with other Birmingham musicians who would later find international fame in music: Christine Perfect , Carl Palmer, Stan Webb and Mike Kellie. Wood played with Perfect in 1964 in the band Shades of Blue a...
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Antonio Moreno
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Antonio Garrido Monteagudo , better known as Antonio Moreno or Tony Moreno, was a Spanish-born American actor and film director of the silent film era and through the 1950s. Early life and silent films Born in Madrid, Spain, Moreno emigrated to New York in 1901 and settled in Massachusetts, where he completed his education. Although he claimed to have attended Williston Seminary in Easthampton, Massachusetts, the Archives of the school, now the Williston Northampton School, have no record of his having done so. He became a stage actor in regional theater productions. In 1912, he moved to Hollywood, California, where he was signed to Biograph Studios, and began his career in bit parts.
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Val Lewton
1904 - 1951 (47 years)
Val Lewton was a Russian-American novelist, film producer and screenwriter best known for a string of low-budget horror films he produced for RKO Pictures in the 1940s. His son, also named Val Lewton, was a painter and exhibition designer.
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Johnny Green
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
John Waldo Green was an American songwriter, composer, musical arranger, conductor and pianist. He was given the nickname "Beulah" by colleague Conrad Salinger. His most famous song was one of his earliest, "Body and Soul" from the revue Three's a Crowd. Green won four Academy Awards for his film scores and a fifth for producing a short musical film, and he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. He was also honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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Harry Warren
1893 - 1981 (88 years)
Harry Warren was an American composer and the first major American songwriter to write primarily for film. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song eleven times and won three Oscars for composing "Lullaby of Broadway", "You'll Never Know" and "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe". He wrote the music for the first blockbuster film musical, 42nd Street, choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with whom he would collaborate on many musical films.
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Giovanni Bononcini
1670 - 1747 (77 years)
Giovanni Bononcini was an Italian Baroque composer, cellist, singer and teacher, one of a family of string players and composers. Biography Early years Bononcini was born in Modena, Italy, the oldest of three sons. His father, Giovanni Maria Bononcini , was a violinist and a composer, and his younger brother, Antonio Maria Bononcini, was also a composer. An orphan from the age of 8, Giovanni Battista studied in the music school of Giovanni Paolo Colonna at San Petronio Basilica in Bologna .
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Henri Herz
1803 - 1888 (85 years)
Henri Herz was a virtuoso pianist, composer and piano manufacturer, Austrian by birth and French by nationality and domicile. He was a professor in the Paris Conservatoire for more than thirty years. Among his major works are eight piano concertos, a piano sonata, rondos, nocturnes, waltzes, marches, fantasias, and numerous sets of variations.
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Eric Dolphy
1928 - 1964 (36 years)
Eric Allan Dolphy Jr. was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist and bandleader. Primarily an alto saxophonist, bass clarinetist, and flautist, Dolphy was one of several multi-instrumentalists to gain prominence during the same era. His use of the bass clarinet helped to establish the unconventional instrument within jazz. Dolphy extended the vocabulary and boundaries of the alto saxophone, and was among the earliest significant jazz flute soloists.
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Tommaso Traetta
1727 - 1779 (52 years)
Tommaso Michele Francesco Saverio Traetta was an Italian composer of the Neapolitan School. Along with other composers mainly in the Holy Roman Empire and France, he was responsible for certain operatic reforms including reducing ornateness of style and the primacy of star singers.
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E. E. Speight
1871 - 1949 (78 years)
Ernest Edwin Speight , usually known as E E Speight, was a Yorkshireman who travelled in Japan and India and was a professor of English for twenty years at the Imperial University, Tokyo, Japan and also at the Fourth Higher School, Kanazawa, then for a further twenty years at the Osmania University, Hyderabad, India. In India he made a study of the Nilgiri hill tribes and was working on a Toda grammar at his death
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Gustaf Gründgens
1899 - 1963 (64 years)
Gustaf Gründgens , born Gustav Heinrich Arnold Gründgens, was one of Germany's most famous and influential actors of the 20th century, and artistic director of theatres in Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg. His career continued unimpeded through the years of the Nazi regime; the extent to which this can be considered as deliberate collaboration with the Nazis is hotly disputed.
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Arthur Benjamin
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Arthur Leslie Benjamin was an Australian composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. He is best known as the composer of Jamaican Rumba and of the Storm Clouds Cantata, featured in both versions of the Alfred Hitchcock film The Man who Knew Too Much, in 1934 and 1956.
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Thomas Mitchell
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Thomas John Mitchell was an American actor and writer. Among his most famous roles in a long career are those of Gerald O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, Doc Boone in Stagecoach, Uncle Billy in It's a Wonderful Life, Pat Garrett in The Outlaw, and Mayor Jonas Henderson in High Noon. Mitchell was the first male actor to gain the Triple Crown of Acting by winning an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony Award.
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Stevie Ray Vaughan
1954 - 1990 (36 years)
Stephen Ray Vaughan was an American musician, best known as the guitarist and frontman of the blues rock trio Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. Although his mainstream career spanned only seven years, he is regarded as one of the most influential musicians in the history of blues music, and one of the greatest guitarists of all time. He was the younger brother of guitarist Jimmie Vaughan.
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J. Pat O'Malley
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Not to be confused with American actor Pat O'Malley. James Rudolph O'Malley was an English character actor and singer who appeared in many American films and television programmes from the 1940s to 1982, using the stage name J. Pat O'Malley. He also appeared on the Broadway stage in Ten Little Indians and Dial M for Murder .
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Jack Haley
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
John Joseph Haley Jr. was an American actor, comedian, dancer, radio host, singer, drummer and vaudevillian. He was best known for his portrayal of the Tin Man and his farmhand counterpart Hickory in the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film The Wizard of Oz.
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Silvana Mangano
1930 - 1989 (59 years)
Silvana Mangano was an Italian film actress. She was one of a generation of thespians who arose from the neorealist movement, and went on to become a major female star, regarded as a sex symbol for the 1950s and '60s. She won the David di Donatello for Best Actress three times - for The Verona Trial , The Witches , and The Scientific Cardplayer – and the Nastro d'Argento for Best Actress twice.
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Stanisław Moniuszko
1819 - 1872 (53 years)
Stanisław Moniuszko was a Polish composer, conductor and teacher. He wrote many popular art songs and operas, and his music is filled with patriotic folk themes of the peoples of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth . He is generally referred to as "the father of Polish national opera". Since the 1990s Stanisław Moniuszko is being recognized in Belarus as an important figure to Belarusian culture as well.
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Helmut Käutner
1908 - 1980 (72 years)
Helmut Käutner was a German film director active mainly in the 1940s and 1950s. He entered the film industry at the end of the Weimar Republic and released his first films as a director in Nazi Germany. Käutner is relatively unknown outside of Germany, although he is considered one of the best filmmakers in German film history. He was one of the most influential film directors of German post-war cinema and became known for his sophisticated literary adaptations.
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Ray Gilbert
1912 - 1976 (64 years)
Ray Gilbert was an American lyricist. He grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. Personal info Born: 5 September 1912 Died: 3 March 1976 Occupations: Lyricist Spouse: Janis Paige Issue: Joanne Gilbert Career Gilbert is best remembered for the lyrics to the Oscar-winning song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" from the film Song of the South, which he wrote with Allie Wrubel in 1947. He also wrote American English lyrics for the songs in The Three Caballeros featuring Donald Duck. He wrote the lyrics for Paul Nero's composition The Hot Canary, and also wrote the English lyrics of the Andy Williams' 1965 hit, "....
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André Berthomieu
1903 - 1960 (57 years)
André Berthomieu was a French screenwriter and film director. He was married to the actress Line Noro. Selected filmography DirectorNot So Stupid The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard The Ladies in the Green Hats My Friend Victor Coquecigrole The Crime of Bouif Mademoiselle Josette, My Woman The Ideal Woman The Secret of Polichinelle The Flame The Lover of Madame Vidal Death on the Run Chaste Susanne The Girl in the Taxi The Train for Venice The New Rich The Woman of Monte Carlo Deputy Eusèbe The Angel of the Night Resistance My First Love Not So Stupid Gringalet Four Knaves The Heart on the Sleeve ...
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Johann Gottfried Walther
1684 - 1748 (64 years)
Johann Gottfried Walther was a German music theorist, organist, composer, and lexicographer of the Baroque era. Life and work Walther was born at Erfurt. Not only was his life almost exactly contemporaneous to that of Johann Sebastian Bach, he was the famous composer's cousin.
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Johannes Ockeghem
1410 - 1497 (87 years)
Johannes Ockeghem was a Franco-Flemish composer and singer of early Renaissance music. Ockeghem was the most influential European composer in the period between Guillaume Du Fay and Josquin des Prez, and he was—with his colleague Antoine Busnois—the leading European composer in the second half of the 15th century. He was an important proponent of the early Franco-Flemish School.
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Bill Robinson
1877 - 1949 (72 years)
Bill Robinson, nicknamed Bojangles , was an American tap dancer, actor, and singer, the best known and the most highly paid African-American entertainer in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. His long career mirrored changes in American entertainment tastes and technology. His career began in the age of minstrel shows and moved to vaudeville, Broadway theatre, the recording industry, Hollywood films, radio, and television.
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Eddie Lang
1902 - 1933 (31 years)
Eddie Lang was an American musician who is credited as the father of jazz guitar. During the 1920s, he gave the guitar a prominence it previously lacked as a solo instrument, as part of a band or orchestra, and as accompaniment for vocalists. He recorded duets with guitarists Lonnie Johnson and Carl Kress and jazz violinist Joe Venuti, and played rhythm guitar in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and was the favoured accompanist of Bing Crosby.
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Christian Schweigaard Stang
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Christian Schweigaard Stang was a Norwegian linguist, Slavicist and Balticist, professor in Balto-Slavic languages at the University of Oslo from 1938 until shortly before his death. He specialized in the study of Lithuanian and was highly regarded in Lithuania.
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Skip James
1902 - 1969 (67 years)
Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter. AllMusic stated: "This emotional, lyrical performer was a talented blues guitarist and arranger with an impressive body of work."
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Alessandro Stradella
1643 - 1682 (39 years)
Antonio Alessandro Boncompagno Stradella was an Italian composer of the middle Baroque period. He enjoyed a dazzling career as a freelance composer, writing on commission, and collaborating with distinguished poets, producing over three hundred works in a variety of genres.
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Fred Astaire
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Fred Astaire was an American dancer, actor, singer, choreographer and presenter. He is widely regarded as the "greatest popular-music dancer of all time". He received numerous accolades including an Honorary Academy Award, three Primetime Emmy Awards, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Grammy Award. He was honored with the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute in 1973, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1978, and AFI Life Achievement Award in 1980. He was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960, American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1972, and the Television Hall of Fame in 1989.
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John Scofield
1951 - Present (75 years)
John Scofield is an American guitarist and composer whose music over a long career has blended jazz, jazz fusion, funk, blues, soul and rock. He first came to mainstream attention in the band of Miles Davis, and has toured and recorded with many prominent jazz artists, including saxophonists Eddie Harris, Dave Liebman, Joe Henderson and Joe Lovano; keyboardists George Duke, Joey DeFrancesco, Herbie Hancock, Larry Goldings and Robert Glasper; fellow guitarists Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Pat Martino and Bill Frisell; bassists Marc Johnson and Jaco Pastorius; and drummers Billy Cobham and Dennis Chambers.
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Gordon Jenkins
1910 - 1984 (74 years)
Gordon Hill Jenkins was an American arranger, composer, and pianist who was influential in popular music in the 1940s and 1950s. Jenkins worked with The Andrews Sisters, Johnny Cash, The Weavers, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Harry Nilsson, Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald.
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Walter Gieseking
1895 - 1956 (61 years)
Walter Wilhelm Gieseking was a French-born German pianist and composer. Gieseking was renowned for his subtle touch, pedaling, and dynamic control—particularly in the music of Debussy and Ravel; he made integral recordings of all their published works which were extant during his life. He also recorded most of Mozart's solo piano works.
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Lawrence Tibbett
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Lawrence Mervil Tibbett was an American opera singer and recording artist who also performed as a film actor and radio personality. A baritone, he sang leading roles with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City more than 600 times from 1923 to 1950. He performed diverse musical theatre roles, including Captain Hook in Peter Pan in a touring show.
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Leslie Cole
1910 - 1976 (66 years)
Leslie James Cole was a British artist and teacher. He served as a war artist from 1942 to 1946 during which time he recorded events in several theatres of war and also the aftermath of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
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Stuart Sutcliffe
1940 - 1962 (22 years)
Stuart Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe was a British painter and musician best known as the original bass guitarist of the Beatles. Sutcliffe left the band to pursue his career as a painter, having previously attended the Liverpool College of Art. Sutcliffe and John Lennon are credited with inventing the name "Beetles" , as they both liked Buddy Holly's band, the Crickets. They also had a fascination of group names with double meanings , so Lennon then came up with "The Beatles", from the word beat . As a member of the group when it was a five-piece band, Sutcliffe is one of several people sometim...
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Helena Modjeska
1840 - 1909 (69 years)
Helena Modrzejewska , known professionally as Helena Modjeska, was a Polish actress who specialized in Shakespearean and tragic roles. She was successful first on the Polish stage. After emigrating to the United States , she also succeeded on stage in America and London. She is regarded as the greatest actress in the history of theatre in Poland.
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Sidney Lanier
1842 - 1881 (39 years)
Sidney Clopton Lanier was an American musician, poet and author. He served in the Confederate States Army as a private, worked on a blockade-running ship for which he was imprisoned , taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church organist, and worked as a lawyer. As a poet he sometimes used dialects. Many of his poems are written in heightened, but often archaic, American English. He became a flautist and sold poems to publications. He eventually became a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and is known for his adaptation of musical meter to poetry.
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Dimitri Mitropoulos
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Dimitri Mitropoulos was a Greek and American conductor, pianist, and composer. Life and career Mitropoulos was born in Athens, the son of Yannis and Angelikē Mitropoulos. His father owned a leather goods shop in downtown Athens. He was musically precocious, demonstrating his abilities at an early age. From the ages of eleven to fourteen, when Mitropoulos was in secondary school, he would host and preside over informal musical gatherings at his house every Saturday afternoon. His earliest acknowledged composition – a sonata for violin and piano, now lost – dates from this period. His opera S...
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William Grant Still
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
William Grant Still Jr. was an American composer of nearly two hundred works, including five symphonies, four ballets, nine operas, over thirty choral works, art songs, chamber music, and solo works. Born in Mississippi and growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, Still attended Wilberforce University and Oberlin Conservatory of Music as a student of George Whitefield Chadwick and then Edgard Varèse. Because of his close association and collaboration with prominent African-American literary and cultural figures, Still is considered to be part of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Albert Bachmann
1863 - 1934 (71 years)
Johann Albert Bachmann was a Swiss lexicographer and dialectologist, professor for Germanic philology at Zürich University from 1896. From 1892 he was an editor of the Schweizerisches Idiotikon dictionary, acting as editor-in-chief from 1896 until his death. Bachmann specialized on Swiss German dialects. He edited the series Beiträge zur Schweizerdeutschen Grammatik and founded, together with Louis Gauchat, the Phonographic Archive of Zurich University in 1913.
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Paul Chambers
1935 - 1969 (34 years)
Paul Laurence Dunbar Chambers Jr. was an American jazz double bassist. A fixture of rhythm sections during the 1950s and 1960s, he has become one of the most widely-known jazz bassists of the hard bop era. He was also known for his bowed solos. Chambers recorded about a dozen albums as a leader or co-leader, and over 100 more as a sideman, especially as the anchor of trumpeter Miles Davis's "first great quintet" and with pianist Wynton Kelly .
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Mark Noble
1754 - 1827 (73 years)
Mark Noble was an English clergyman, biographer and antiquary. Life He was born in Digbeth, Birmingham, the third surviving son of William Heatley Noble, a merchant there. His father sold, among many other commodities, beads, knives, toys, and other trifles which he distributed wholesale among slave traders, and he had also a large mill for rolling silver and for plating purposes. Mark was educated at schools at Yardley, Worcestershire, and Ashbourne, Derbyshire. On the death of his father he inherited a modest fortune, and was articled to Mr. Barber, a solicitor of Birmingham. On the expira...
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Maurice Greene
1696 - 1755 (59 years)
Maurice Greene was an English composer and organist. Biography Born in London, the son of a clergyman, Greene became a choirboy at St Paul's Cathedral under Jeremiah Clarke and Charles King. He studied the organ under Richard Brind, and after Brind died, Greene became organist at St Paul's.
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Josephine Baker
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Freda Josephine Baker , naturalised as Joséphine Baker, was an American-born French dancer, singer and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 silent film Siren of the Tropics, directed by and .
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Alexander Mackenzie
1847 - 1935 (88 years)
Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie KCVO was a Scottish composer, conductor and teacher best known for his oratorios, violin and piano pieces, Scottish folk music and works for the stage. Mackenzie was a member of a musical family and was sent for his musical education to Germany. He had many successes as a composer, producing over 90 compositions, but from 1888 to 1924, he devoted a great part of his energies to running the Royal Academy of Music. Together with Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, he was regarded as one of the fathers of the British musical renaissance in the late nine...
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Alan Crosland
1894 - 1936 (42 years)
Frederick Alan Crosland was an American stage actor and film director. He is noted for having directed the first feature film using spoken dialogue, The Jazz Singer . Early life and career Born in New York City, New York to a well-to-do Jewish family, Crosland attended Dartmouth College. After graduation, he took a job as a writer with the New York Globe magazine. Interested in the theatre, he began acting on stage, appearing in several productions with Shakespearian actress Annie Russell.
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Edward Alleyn
1566 - 1626 (60 years)
Edward "Ned" Alleyn was an English actor who was a major figure of the Elizabethan theatre and founder of the College of God's Gift in Dulwich. Early life Alleyn was born on 1 September 1566 in Bishopsgate, London; or so it was recorded in the Biographia Britannica as a product of Alleyn's own writing. Alleyn does record his birth date in a diary several times but does not distinctly identify his birthplace as Bishopsgate. In the St. Botolph parish registers it is recorded that he was baptized on the day after his birth. He was born a younger son of Edward Alleyn with three brothers named John, William, and Edward.
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Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov
1859 - 1935 (76 years)
Mikhail Mikhailovich Ippolitov-Ivanov was a Russian and Soviet composer, conductor and teacher. His music ranged from the late-Romantic era into the 20th century era. Biography He was born in 1859 at Gatchina, near St. Petersburg, where his father was a mechanic employed at the palace. His birth name was Mikhail Mikhailovich Ivanov; later he added Ippolitov, his mother's maiden name, to distinguish himself from a composer and music critic with an identical name . He studied music at home and was a choirboy at the cathedral of St. Isaac, where he also had musical instruction, before entering the St.
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Alfred Rosenberg
1893 - 1946 (53 years)
Alfred Ernst Rosenberg was a Baltic German Nazi theorist and ideologue. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart and he held several important posts in the Nazi government. He was the head of the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs during the entire rule of Nazi Germany , and led Amt Rosenberg , an official Nazi body for cultural policy and surveillance, between 1934 and 1945. During World War II, Rosenberg was the head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories . After the war, he was convicted of crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials in 1946.
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Friedrich Silcher
1789 - 1860 (71 years)
Philipp Friedrich Silcher , was a German composer, mainly known for his lieder , and an important Volkslied collector. Life Silcher was meant to be a school teacher, but dedicated himself entirely to music in the seminary in Ludwigsburg after he met Carl Maria von Weber. He was taught composition and piano by Conradin Kreutzer and Johann Nepomuk Hummel. In 1817 he was named musical director at the University of Tübingen. He is regarded as one of the most important protagonists of choir singing. He arranged many German Volkslieder and international folk songs that have remained standard repertoire of many choirs in Germany and became an integral part of German daily life.
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