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.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#15401
Yuen Ren Chao
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Yuen Ren Chao , also known as Zhao Yuanren, was a Chinese-American linguist, educator, scholar, poet, and composer, who contributed to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar. Chao was born and raised in China, then attended university in the United States, where he earned degrees from Cornell University and Harvard University. A naturally gifted polyglot and linguist, his Mandarin Primer was one of the most widely used Mandarin Chinese textbooks in the 20th century. He invented the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization scheme, which, unlike pinyin and other romanization systems, transcribe...
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Vladimir Propp
1895 - 1970 (75 years)
Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a Soviet folklorist and scholar who analysed the basic structural elements of Russian folk taless to identify their simplest irreducible structural units. Biography Vladimir Propp was born on 29 April 1895 in Saint Petersburg to an assimilated Russian family of German descent. His parents, Yakov Philippovich Propp and Anna-Elizaveta Fridrikhovna Propp , were Volga German wealthy peasants from Saratov Governorate. He attended Saint Petersburg University , majoring in Russian and German philology. Upon graduation he taught Russian and German at a secondary school...
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James Thurber
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
James Grover Thurber was an American cartoonist, writer, humorist, journalist and playwright. He was best known for his cartoons and short stories, published mainly in The New Yorker and collected in his numerous books.
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Yves Tanguy
1900 - 1955 (55 years)
Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy , known as just Yves Tanguy , was a French surrealist painter. Biography Tanguy was the son of a retired navy captain, and was born January 5, 1900, at the Ministry of Naval Affairs on Place de la Concorde in Paris, France] His parents were both of Breton origin. After his father's death in 1908, his mother moved back to her native Locronan, Finistère, and he ended up spending much of his youth living with various relatives.
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Isadora Duncan
1877 - 1927 (50 years)
Angela Isadora Duncan was an American-born dancer and choreographer, who was a pioneer of modern contemporary dance, who performed to great acclaim throughout Europe and the US. Born and raised in California, she lived and danced in Western Europe, the US and Soviet Russia from the age of 22. She died when her scarf became entangled in the wheel and axle of the car in which she was travelling in Nice, France.
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Paul Celan
1920 - 1970 (50 years)
Paul Celan , born Paul Antschel, was a Romanian poet and translator, regarded as one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era. His poetry is characterized by a complicated and cryptic style that deviates from poetic conventions.
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George Frideric Handel
1685 - 1759 (74 years)
George Frideric Handel was a German-British Baroque composer well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concertos. Handel received his training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712, where he spent the bulk of his career and became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, Handel's music forms one of the peaks of the "high baroque" style, bringing Italian opera to its highest developme...
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Franz Liszt
1811 - 1886 (75 years)
Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, and teacher of the Romantic period. With a diverse body of work spanning more than six decades, he is considered to be one of the most prolific and influential composers of his era and remains one of the most popular composers in modern concert piano repertoire.
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Claude Debussy
1862 - 1918 (56 years)
Claude Debussy was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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George Herbert
1593 - 1633 (40 years)
George Herbert was an English poet, orator, and priest of the Church of England. His poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is recognised as "one of the foremost British devotional lyricists." He was born in Wales into an artistic and wealthy family and largely raised in England. He received a good education that led to his admission to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1609. He went there with the intention of becoming a priest, but he became the University's Public Orator and attracted the attention of King James I. He sat in the Parliament of England in 1624 ...
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Stefan George
1868 - 1933 (65 years)
Stefan Anton George was a German symbolist poet and a translator of Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Hesiod, and Charles Baudelaire. He is also known for his role as leader of the highly influential literary circle called the George-Kreis and for founding the literary magazine . From the inception of his circle, George and his followers represented a literary and cultural revolt against the literary realism trend in German literature during the last decades of the German Empire.
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Giuseppe Verdi
1813 - 1901 (88 years)
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian composer best known for his operas. He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, receiving a musical education with the help of a local patron. Verdi came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti, whose works significantly influenced him.
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Georgette Heyer
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Georgette Heyer was an English novelist and short-story writer, in both the Regency romance and detective fiction genres. Her writing career began in 1921, when she turned a story conceived for her ailing younger brother into the novel The Black Moth. In 1925 Heyer married George Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer. The couple spent several years living in Tanganyika Territory and Macedonia before returning to England in 1929. After her novel These Old Shades became popular despite its release during the General Strike, Heyer determined that publicity was not necessary for good sales. For the r...
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Ninette de Valois
1898 - 2001 (103 years)
Dame Ninette de Valois was an Irish-born British dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director of classical ballet. Most notably, she danced professionally with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, later establishing the Royal Ballet, one of the foremost ballet companies of the 20th century and one of the leading ballet companies in the world. She also established the Royal Ballet School and the touring company which became the Birmingham Royal Ballet. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of ballet and as the "godmother" of English and Irish ballet.
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Émile Littré
1801 - 1881 (80 years)
Émile Maximilien Paul Littré was a French lexicographer, freemason and philosopher, best known for his , commonly called . Biography Littré was born in Paris. His father, Michel-François Littré, had been a gunner and, later, a sergeant-major of marine artillery in the French navy who was deeply imbued with revolutionary ideas of the day. Settling down as a tax collector, he married Sophie Johannot, a free-thinker like himself, and devoted himself to the education of his son Émile. The boy was sent to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where Louis Hachette and Eugène Burnouf became his friends. After h...
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Charles Kay Ogden
1889 - 1957 (68 years)
Charles Kay Ogden was an English linguist, philosopher, and writer. Described as a polymath but also an eccentric and outsider, he took part in many ventures related to literature, politics, the arts, and philosophy, having a broad effect particularly as an editor, translator, and activist on behalf of a reformed version of the English language. He is typically defined as a linguistic psychologist, and is now mostly remembered as the inventor and propagator of Basic English.
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Yves Klein
1928 - 1962 (34 years)
Yves Klein was a French artist and an important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of minimal art, as well as pop art. He is known for the development and use of International Klein Blue.
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Charles Wilkins
1749 - 1836 (87 years)
Sir Charles Wilkins was an English typographer and Orientalist, and founding member of The Asiatic Society. He is notable as the first translator of Bhagavad Gita into English. He is also the first person to introduce the term Hinduism which would refer to all the different mythologies and cultures of which were existing in India as one. He supervised Panchanan Karmakar to create one of the first Bengali typefaces. In 1788, Wilkins was elected a member of the Royal Society.
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Libanius
314 - 393 (79 years)
Libanius was a teacher of rhetoric of the Sophist school in the Eastern Roman Empire. His prolific writings make him one of the best documented teachers of higher education in the ancient world and a critical source of history of the Greek East during the 4th century AD. During the rise of Christian hegemony in the later Roman Empire, he remained unconverted and in religious matters was a pagan Hellene.
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Laura Ingalls Wilder
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was an American writer. The Little House on the Prairie series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943, were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.
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Igor Stravinsky
1882 - 1971 (89 years)
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer and conductor with French nationality and United States citizenship . He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music.
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Lorenzo Da Ponte
1749 - 1838 (89 years)
Lorenzo Da Ponte was a Venetian, later American, opera librettist, poet and Roman Catholic priest. He wrote the libretti for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's most celebrated operas: The Marriage of Figaro , Don Giovanni , and Così fan tutte . He was the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, and with Manuel Garcia, the first to introduce Italian opera to America. Da Ponte was also a close friend of Mozart and Casanova.
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André Lhote
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
André Lhote was a French Cubist painter of figure subjects, portraits, landscapes and still life. He was also active and influential as a teacher and writer on art. Early life and education Lhote was born 5 July 1885 in Bordeaux, France, and learned wood carving and sculpture from the age of 12, when his father apprenticed him to a local furniture maker to be trained as a sculptor in wood. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux in 1898 and studied decorative sculpture until 1904.
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Hector Berlioz
1803 - 1869 (66 years)
Louis-Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer and conductor. His output includes orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy, choral pieces including the Requiem and L'Enfance du Christ, his three operas Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, and works of hybrid genres such as the "dramatic symphony" Roméo et Juliette and the "dramatic legend" La Damnation de Faust.
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Lysias
445 BC - 380 BC (65 years)
Lysias was a logographer in Ancient Greece. He was one of the ten Attic orators included in the "Alexandrian Canon" compiled by Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace in the third century BC.
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Henri Fantin-Latour
1836 - 1904 (68 years)
Henri Fantin-Latour was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers. Early life Born in Grenoble, Isère, Ignace Henri Jean Théodore Fantin-Latour first had drawing lessons with his father Théodore Fantin-Latour , who was a painter. In 1850 he moved to Paris where he enrolled in the small Paris School of Drawing, where he studied with Louis-Alexandre Péron and Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, an innovative and non-traditional instructor who developed his own teaching method based on painting and drawing from memory.
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Charles Anderson Dana
1819 - 1897 (78 years)
Charles Anderson Dana was an American journalist, author, and senior government official. He was a top aide to Horace Greeley as the managing editor of the powerful Republican newspaper New-York Tribune until 1862. During the American Civil War, he served as Assistant Secretary of War, playing especially the role of the liaison between the War Department and General Ulysses S. Grant. In 1868 he became the editor and part-owner of The New York Sun. He at first appealed to working class Democrats but after 1890 became a champion of business-oriented conservatism. Dana was an avid art collector ...
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Laurence Olivier
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, was an English actor and director who, along with his contemporaries Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, was one of a trio of male actors who dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He also worked in films throughout his career, playing more than fifty cinema roles. Late in his career he had considerable success in television roles.
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Jan Baudouin de Courtenay
1845 - 1929 (84 years)
Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay was a Polish linguist and Slavist, best known for his theory of the phoneme and phonetic alternations. For most of his life Baudouin de Courtenay worked at Imperial Russian universities: Kazan , Dorpat , Kraków in Austria-Hungary, and St. Petersburg . In 1919–1929 he was a professor at the re-established University of Warsaw in a once again independent Poland.
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Nikolai Trubetzkoy
1890 - 1938 (48 years)
Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology. He was also associated with the Russian Eurasianists.
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James M. Cain
1892 - 1977 (85 years)
James Mallahan Cain was an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He is widely regarded as a progenitor of the hardboiled school of American crime fiction. His novels The Postman Always Rings Twice , Double Indemnity , Serenade , Mildred Pierce and The Butterfly brought him critical acclaim and an immense popular readership in America and abroad.
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John Franklin
1786 - 1847 (61 years)
Sir John Franklin was a British Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer. After serving in wars against Napoleonic France and the United States, he led two expeditions into the Canadian Arctic and through the islands of the Arctic Archipelago, in 1819 and 1825, and served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land from 1839 to 1843. During his third and final expedition, an attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage in 1845, Franklin's ships became icebound off King William Island in what is now Nunavut, where he died in June 1847. The icebound ships were abandoned ten months later and the ent...
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Philip K. Dick
1928 - 1982 (54 years)
Philip Kindred Dick , often referred to by his initials PKD, was an American science fiction writer. He wrote 44 novels and about 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. His fiction explored varied philosophical and social questions such as the nature of reality, perception, human nature, and identity, and commonly featured characters struggling against elements such as alternate realities, illusory environments, monopolistic corporations, drug abuse, authoritarian governments, and altered states of consciousness. He is considered one of the ...
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Edgar Wallace
1875 - 1932 (57 years)
Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was a British writer of sensational detective, gangster, adventure and sci-fi novels, plays and stories. Born into poverty as an illegitimate London child, Wallace left school at the age of 12. He joined the army at age 21 and was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War for Reuters and the Daily Mail. Struggling with debt, he left South Africa, returned to London and began writing thrillers to raise income, publishing books including The Four Just Men . Drawing on his time as a reporter in the Congo, covering the Belgian atrocities, Wallace serialised shor...
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Frédéric Chopin
1810 - 1849 (39 years)
Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic period, who wrote primarily for solo piano. He has maintained worldwide renown as a leading musician of his era, one whose "poetic genius was based on a professional technique that was without equal in his generation".
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Banjo Paterson
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, was an Australian bush poet, journalist and author. He wrote many ballads and poems about Australian life, focusing particularly on the rural and outback areas, including the district around Binalong, New South Wales, where he spent much of his childhood. Paterson's more notable poems include "Clancy of the Overflow" , "The Man from Snowy River" and "Waltzing Matilda" , regarded widely as Australia's unofficial national anthem.
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Richard Riemerschmid
1868 - 1957 (89 years)
Richard Riemerschmid was a German architect, painter, designer and city planner from Munich. He was a major figure in Jugendstil, the German form of Art Nouveau, and a founder of architecture in the style. A founder member of both the Vereinigte Werkstätte für Kunst im Handwerk and the Deutscher Werkbund and the director of art and design institutions in Munich and Cologne, he prized craftsmanship but also pioneered machine production of artistically designed objects.
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Mesrop Mashtots
361 - 440 (79 years)
Mesrop Mashtots was an early Medieval Armenian linguist, composer, theologian, statesman, and hymnologist in the Sasanian Empire. He is venerated as a saint in the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Armenian Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. He is best known for inventing the Armenian alphabet AD, which was a fundamental step in strengthening Armenian national identity. He is also considered to be the creator of the Caucasian Albanian and Georgian alphabets by a number of scholars.
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Charles Wesley
1707 - 1788 (81 years)
Charles Wesley was an English leader of the Methodist movement. Wesley was a prolific hymnwriter who wrote over 6,500 hymns during his lifetime. His works include "And Can It Be", "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today", "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling", the carol "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing", and "Lo! He Comes With Clouds Descending".
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Italo Calvino
1923 - 1985 (62 years)
Italo Calvino was an Italian writer and journalist. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .
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Katherine Anne Porter
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Katherine Anne Porter was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, poet and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim.
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Hugo Schuchardt
1842 - 1927 (85 years)
Hugo Ernst Mario Schuchardt was an eminent German linguist, best known for his work in the Romance languages, the Basque language, and in mixed languages, including pidgins, creoles, and the Lingua franca of the Mediterranean.
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Alexander Rodchenko
1891 - 1956 (65 years)
Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was a Russian and Soviet artist, sculptor, photographer, and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova.
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John Rupert Firth
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
John Rupert Firth OBE , commonly known as J. R. Firth, was an English linguist and a leading figure in British linguistics during the 1950s. Education and career Firth studied history at University of Leeds, graduating with a BA in 1911 and an MA in 1913. He taught history at the City of Leeds Training College before World War I broke out. He joined the Indian Education Service during 1914–1918. He was Professor of English at the University of the Punjab from 1919 to 1928. He then worked in the phonetics department of University College London before moving to the School of Oriental and Africa...
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Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
1724 - 1803 (79 years)
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock was a German poet. His best known works are the epic poem Der Messias and the poem Die Auferstehung, that was used for Gustav Mahler's epic apocalyptic final movement of his Symphony no. 2. One of his major contributions to German literature was to open it up to exploration outside of French models.
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Richard Strauss
1864 - 1949 (85 years)
Richard Georg Strauss was a German composer and conductor best known for his tone poems and operas. Considered a leading composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras, he has been described as a successor of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Along with Gustav Mahler, he represents the late flowering of German Romanticism, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.
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Kurt Tucholsky
1890 - 1935 (45 years)
Kurt Tucholsky was a German journalist, satirist, and writer. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Kaspar Hauser , Peter Panter, Theobald Tiger and Ignaz Wrobel. A politically engaged journalist and temporary co-editor of the weekly magazine Die Weltbühne, he was simultaneously a satirist, an author of satirical political revues, a songwriter, and a poet. He saw himself as a left-wing democrat and pacifist and warned against anti-democratic tendencies — above all in politics and the military — and the threat of Nazism. His fears were confirmed when the Nazis came to power in January 1933. In Ma...
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Jacob Riis
1849 - 1914 (65 years)
Jacob August Riis was a Danish-American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist, and social documentary photographer. He contributed significantly to the cause of urban reform in the United States of America at the turn of the twentieth century. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. Additionally, as one of the most fa...
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Saint Giles
640 - 710 (70 years)
Saint Giles , also known as Giles the Hermit, was a hermit or monk active in the lower Rhône most likely in the 7th century. Revered as a saint, his cult became widely diffused but his hagiography is mostly legendary. A town that bears his name grew up around the monastery he purportedly founded, which became a pilgrimage centre and a stop on the Way of Saint James. He is traditionally one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers.
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Lester Bangs
1948 - 1982 (34 years)
Leslie Conway "Lester" Bangs was an American music journalist. He wrote for Creem and Rolling Stone magazines, and was a leading influence in rock music criticism. The music critic Jim DeRogatis called him "America's greatest rock critic".
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