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 Education,
#2351
Otto Kraushaar
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Otto Frederick Krausharr was an American professor of philosophy who served as the 6th president of Goucher College. Kraushaar was also a professor at Smith College for 15 years. Early life and education Kraushaar was born on November 19, 1901, in Clinton, Iowa, to Otto Christian Kraushaar and Mary Elizabeth Staehling. Kraushaar attended the University of Iowa, from which he earned a bachelor's degree in 1923 and a master's degree in 1927. He continued his graduate studies at Harvard University, earning a doctorate in 1933. His dissertation was titled Lotze's Theory of Knowledge.
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A. D. Gordon
1856 - 1922 (66 years)
Aaron David Gordon , more commonly known as A. D. Gordon, was a Labour Zionist thinker and the spiritual force behind practical Zionism and Labor Zionism. He founded Hapoel Hatzair, a movement that set the tone for the Zionist movement for many years to come. Influenced by Leo Tolstoy and others, it is said that in effect he made a religion of labor. Gordon moved to Ottoman Palestine in 1904, at age 48, where he was revered by younger Zionist pioneers for leading by example.
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Friedrich Ludwig Jahn
1778 - 1853 (75 years)
was a German gymnastics educator and nationalist whose writing is credited with the founding of the German gymnastics movement as well as influencing the German Campaign of 1813, during which a coalition of German states effectively ended the occupation by Napoleon's First French Empire. His admirers know him as , roughly meaning "Father of Gymnastics ".
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Joseph Losey
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Joseph Walton Losey III was an American theatre and film director, producer, and screenwriter. Born in Wisconsin, he studied in Germany with Bertolt Brecht and then returned to the United States. Blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950s, he moved to Europe where he made the remainder of his films, mostly in the United Kingdom. Among the most critically and commercially successful were the films with screenplays by Harold Pinter: The Servant and The Go-Between .
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Alcide d'Orbigny
1802 - 1857 (55 years)
Alcide Charles Victor Marie Dessalines d'Orbigny was a French naturalist who made major contributions in many areas, including zoology , palaeontology, geology, archaeology and anthropology. D'Orbigny was born in Couëron , the son of a ship's physician and amateur naturalist. The family moved to La Rochelle in 1820, where his interest in natural history was developed while studying the marine fauna and especially the microscopic creatures that he named "foraminiferans".
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Claudia A. Baier
#2357
Kenneth G. Matheson
1864 - 1931 (67 years)
Kenneth Gordon Matheson was a professor at and a chancellor of several educational institutions. Early life Matheson was an 1885 graduate of the South Carolina Military Academy, now known as The Citadel where he was initiated into the Kappa Alpha Order. He then served as commandant of cadets at Georgia Military College in Milledgeville, Georgia from 1885 to 1888, at the University of Tennessee from 1888 to 1890, and at the Missouri Military Academy from 1890 to 1896; he also taught English at the latter two institutions. In 1896, Matheson resigned to enter Stanford University, and earned a ma...
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George Arliss
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
George Arliss was an English actor, author, playwright, and filmmaker who found success in the United States. He was the first British actor to win an Academy Award – which he won for his performance as Victorian-era British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli in Disraeli – as well as the earliest-born actor to win the honour. He specialized in successful biopics, such as Disraeli, Voltaire , and Cardinal Richelieu , as well as light comedies, which included The Millionaire and A Successful Calamity .
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Maurice Holleaux
1861 - 1932 (71 years)
Maurice Holleaux was a 19th–20th-century French historian, archaeologist and epigrapher, a specialist of Ancient Greece. Biography Années de formation Admitted in the École normale supérieure in 1879, Holleaux was agrégé in history in 1881 and became a member of the French School at Athens in 1882. He then conducted epigraphic explorations in Samos and Rhodes. He devoted thereafter an important scientific activity in the latter city. In 1884 he undertook missions in Asia Minor during which he discovered with Pierre Paris the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda. Back in Greece, he excavated in Boeotia the Ptoion sanctuary which had been previously identified by the traveler William Leake.
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Elizabeth Powell Bond
1841 - 1926 (85 years)
Elizabeth Powell Bond was an educator and social activist who was the first Dean of Women at Swarthmore College. Family and education Elizabeth Powell was born in 1841 in Clinton, New York, to a Quaker couple, Catherine Macy Powell and Townsend Powell. Her father was a farmer, and when she was four, the family moved to a farm in Ghent. By the age of 15, she was serving as an assistant teacher at a Friends’ School in the county. She graduated at the age of seventeen from the State Normal School in Albany.
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Elisha Mitchell
1793 - 1857 (64 years)
Elisha Mitchell was an American educator, geologist and Presbyterian minister. His geological studies led to the identification of North Carolina's Mount Mitchell as the highest peak in the United States east of the Mississippi River.
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Ernst Langlotz
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
Ernst Langlotz was a German classical archaeologist and art historian, who specialized in Greek sculpture of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. He studied classical archaeology, philology and art history at the universities of Leipzig and Munich, receiving his doctorate in 1921. As a student, his influences were archaeologist Franz Studniczka and art historian Heinrich Wölfflin . Following graduation, he took a study trip to Italy and Greece, where he met with Ernst Buschor in Athens. In 1925 he qualified as a lecturer at the University of Würzburg, and subsequently worked as a conservator at th...
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Jennie Fowler Willing
1834 - 1916 (82 years)
Jennie Fowler Willing was a Canadian-born American educator, author, preacher, social reformer, and suffragist. She married a lawyer and Methodist pastor at age 19. In 1873, she and her husband became professors at Illinois Wesleyan University. In addition to teaching, she was a leader in the temperance movement. Willing came to notice when she joined the Illinois Woman's State Temperance Union, serving as its leader for some years. She and Emily Huntington Miller were involved with creating and presiding over the First Woman's National Temperance Convention of 1874 in Cleveland where the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union was formed.
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Victor Bursian
1886 - 1945 (59 years)
Victor Robertovich Bursian was a Soviet scientist who worked on theoretical physics, geophysics, electricity and thermodynamics, crystal physics, and the theory of electrical resistivity tomography.
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Joseph Cummings
1817 - 1890 (73 years)
Joseph Cummings was an American academic who served as the 5th president of Wesleyan University from 1857 to 1875, the 5th president of Northwestern University from 1881 to 1890, and the president of Genesee College from 1854 to 1857.
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Botho Graef
1857 - 1917 (60 years)
Franz Botho Graef was a German classical archaeologist and art historian. His father was painter Gustav Graef, and his sister, Sabine Lepsius, was also an artist of some note. Graef taught at the University of Jena from 1904 until 1917.
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Rufus Early Clement
1900 - 1967 (67 years)
Rufus Early Clement was an American academic administrator and university president. He served as the sixth and longest-serving president of the historically black Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia.
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William Richardson
1743 - 1814 (71 years)
William Richardson FRSE was a Scottish classicist and literary scholar. In 1783 he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Life Born in Aberfoyle, Perthshire, he was the son of Rev. James Richardson, the Church of Scotland parish minister of the same parish in which William was first educated. William attended the University of Glasgow in 1757 where he focused on his talent for learning languages. He graduated MA from the University in 1763 and was employed by Charles Cathcart, 9th Lord Cathcart, as tutor to his two sons.
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Mary Harriott Norris
1848 - 1918 (70 years)
Mary Harriott Norris was an American author and educator. Born in Boonton, New Jersey to Charles Bryan Norris and Mary Lyon Kerr, she was educated at Vassar College, where she graduated with honor, receiving an A.B. degree in 1870. Two years later in 1872 she was invited back to deliver the annual commencement address to the college. She became a writer of short stories, novels, and educational articles; she edited several works and gave a number of lectures. Norris was a regular contributor to the Boston Journal of Education.
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Mary Mitchell Birchall
1846 - 1898 (52 years)
Mary Mitchell Birchall, born Mary Wheelwright Mitchell , was the first woman in New England to earn a bachelor's degree when she graduated from Bates College in 1869. She later served as a professor at Vassar College and founded a girls' school in Boston.
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James Fitzjames Duff
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Sir James Fitzjames Duff was an English academic and Vice-chancellor of Durham University. The son of James Duff Duff, he was educated at Winchester College then at Trinity College, Cambridge. In the 1920s, he conducted pioneering research with Godfrey Thomson on the relationship between IQ and social class, now regarded as controversial. He was Professor of Education at the University of Manchester from 1932 to 1937, then Warden of Durham University from 1937 until 1960. During this time, he held the position of Vicechancellor for 6 periods of two years, in alternation with the Rector of Ki...
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María Teresa Babín Cortés
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
María Teresa Babín Cortés was a Puerto Rican educator, literary critic, and essayist. She also wrote poetry and plays. Among her best-known works is Panorama de la Cultura Puertorriqueña and several essays on Federico García Lorca.
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Ole Borch
1626 - 1690 (64 years)
Ole Borch was a Danish scientist, physician, grammarian, and poet. He was royal physician to both Kings Frederick III of Denmark and Christian V of Denmark. He was the founder of Borchs Kollegium and is noted for being the influential instructor of scientist Nicolas Steno.
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Wilhelm Hemprich
1796 - 1825 (29 years)
Wilhelm Friedrich Hemprich was a German naturalist and explorer. Hemprich was born in Glatz , Prussian Silesia, and studied medicine at Breslau and Berlin. It was in Berlin that he became friends with Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, the two men sharing an interest in natural history. Hemprich lectured at Berlin University on comparative physiology, and wrote Grundriss der Naturgeschichte . In his spare time he studied reptiles and amphibians at the zoological museum under Hinrich Lichtenstein.
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Anna Cheney Edwards
1835 - 1930 (95 years)
Anna Cheney Edwards was a 19th-century American educator from the U.S. state of Massachusetts. She served as Associate Principal of Mount Holyoke Seminary, 1872–1888; and as Professor of Theism and Christian Evidences, 1888–1890.
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William Westley Guth
1871 - 1929 (58 years)
William Westley Guth was an American attorney, Methodist minister, and academic who served as the fourth president of Goucher College. Early life, family, and education Guth was born on October 15, 1871, in Nashville, Tennessee, to Rev. George Guth and Susan Sophie Grandlienard of Perrefitte, Switzerland. Guth was of German, French, and Swiss descent. When he was a teenager, his family moved to San Francisco, California. He enrolled at the University of the Pacific and continued his studies at the then-newly established Stanford University, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1892.
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William Carey Crane
1816 - 1885 (69 years)
William Carey Crane was an American Baptist minister, an educator, and the president of Baylor University from 1864 to 1885. Early life and education William Carey Crane was born in Richmond, Virginia, on March 17, 1816. He attended the Mount Pleasant Classical Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Virginia Baptist Seminary, now known as Richmond College. In 1883, he attended the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institute and Madison, now known as Colgate University. In 1836, he received a B.A. from Columbian College, now known as George Washington University, followed by an M.A. in 1839.
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Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann
1743 - 1815 (72 years)
Eberhardt August Wilhelm von Zimmermann was a German geographer and zoologist. He studied natural philosophy and mathematics in Leiden, Halle, Berlin, and Göttingen, and in 1766 was appointed professor of mathematics and natural sciences at the Collegium Carolinum in Braunschweig. One of his pupils was mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. From 1789 onward, he served as aulic councillor in Braunschweig.
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Anders Bugge
1889 - 1955 (66 years)
Anders Bugge was a Norwegian theologist and art historian. Biography Anders Ragnar Bugge was born in Sandsvær in Kongsberg, Norway. He was the son of Christian August Bugge and Dina Alette Danielsen . His father was a theologian and a chaplain at Botsfengslet. He attended the University of Kristiania, where he graduated with a degree in art in 1907 and became cand.theol. in 1914. In 1912–18 he was assistant and later curator at the Museum of Art and Design in Kristiania. In 1929 he defended his doctoral dissertation.
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Maya Deren
1917 - 1961 (44 years)
Maya Deren was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker and important part of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer.
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Homer Sprague
1829 - 1918 (89 years)
Homer Baxter Sprague was an American author, educator, abolitionist, and Lieutenant Colonel of the Union Army. A native of Sutton, Massachusetts, Sprague was a Captain of the 13th Connecticut Infantry Regiment in 1861 when the American Civil War began, and quickly rose to the rank of Colonel before being captured as a prisoner of war by the Confederate Army in 1864. In 1865 he was released in a prisoner exchange, and remained active within the military until the end of the war.
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Carl Oesterley
1805 - 1891 (86 years)
Carl Wilhelm Friedrich Oesterley was a German painter and art historian. He is remembered largely for creating oil paintings with Biblical themes. Biography He was a native of Göttingen, and studied archaeology, philosophy and history at the University of Göttingen, where in 1824 he earned his doctorate in the field of art history. Subsequently he studied drawing in Dresden, where he was a student of Johann Gottlob Matthäi . He then spent several years in Rome .
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Viktor Heikel
1842 - 1927 (85 years)
Frans Viktor Heikel was a Finland-Swedish gymnastics teacher, known as "the father of Finnish school gymnastics". Life Heikel was born in Turku to educator and priest Henrik Heikel and Wilhelmina Johanna Schauman. He had ten siblings, including brother Felix Heikel , a bank manager and politician and sister Anna Heikel, head of the School for the Deaf. In 1873 Heikel married Hanna Kihlman. He was father to doctor Allan Phayllos Heikel and ethnologist Yngvar Heikel . He was also cousin to ethnographer Axel Heikel and philologist Ivar Heikel.
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Alexander Adam
1741 - 1809 (68 years)
Alexander Adam was a Scottish teacher and writer on Roman antiquities. Life Alexander Adam was born near Forres, in Moray, the son of a farmer. From his earliest years he showed uncommon diligence and perseverance in classical studies, notwithstanding many difficulties and privations. In 1757 he went to Edinburgh, where he studied at the University of Edinburgh. During this period he lodged with a Mr Watson on Restalrig.
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Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert
1780 - 1860 (80 years)
Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert was a German physician, naturalist and psychologist. Biography He began his studies with theology, but turned to medicine and established himself as a doctor in Altenburg, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. He soon gave up his practice however and devoted himself to research in Dresden . In 1809, by way of mediation from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, he received the post of rector at a secondary school in Nuremberg.
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Viktor Lazarev
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Viktor Nikitich Lazarev was a Soviet and Russian art critic and historian who specialized in medieval Byzantine, Russian, and Armenian religious art. He was the son of Nikita Lazarev, a Moscow architect, and was related by blood to Wassily Kandinsky.
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David Smith
1888 - 1982 (94 years)
Sir David Stanley Smith was a New Zealand lawyer, judge and educationalist. Smith was born in Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand in 1888. He worked for Charles Morison as an assistant from 1912. He Smith was appointed as a judge to the Supreme Court in 1928, a relatively early appointment based on his performance as counsel for Maori land claims. Smith received a knighthood in the 1948 New Year Honours. A few months later, he resigned as a judge and concentrated on public affairs.
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John Gilbert
1812 - 1845 (33 years)
John Gilbert was an English naturalist and explorer. Gilbert is often cited in the earliest descriptions of many Australian animals, many of which were unrecorded in European literature, and some of these are named for him by those authors. Gilbert was sent to the newly founded Swan River Colony and made collections and notes on the unique birds and mammals of the surrounding region. He later joined expeditions to remote parts the country, continuing to make records and collections until he was killed during a violent altercation at Mitchell River on the Cape York Peninsula.
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John McGilvrey
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
John Edward McGilvrey was an American academic who was the first president of what is now Kent State University. McGilvrey was educated at the Indiana State Normal School, receiving his bachelor of arts and sciences degree in 1895. He also received an honorary doctorate from Miami University in 1915. At the time of his appointment at the Kent State Normal School in 1911, McGilvrey had recently begun his position as head of the education department at the Western Illinois Normal School in Macomb, Illinois. Other positions held included professor of education at Illinois University, princip...
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Robert Witt
1872 - 1952 (80 years)
Sir Robert Clermont Witt was a British art historian, who, along with Samuel Courtauld and Lord Lee of Fareham, was a co-founder of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Witt was born in Camberwell, south London, in 1872, the son of German parents Gustavus Andreas Witt, a merchant born in Hamburg, and Friederike Helene Von Clermont, from Frankfurt. He was educated at Clifton College and read history at New College, Oxford. In 1896, he fought in the Second Matabele War, and worked alongside Cecil Rhodes as a war correspondent.
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António de Gouveia
1505 - 1566 (61 years)
António de Gouveia was a Portuguese humanist and educator during the Renaissance. Gouveia was born in Beja. After graduating in Paris he taught at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, and then at Toulouse, Avignon, Lyon, Cahors, Valence, Grenoble, Turin and Mondovi. His controversy with Pierre de la Ramée about Aristotle became famous. He wrote literary and philosophical works, having correspondeded with most of the writers of his time. He was brother to André de Gouveia and nephew of Diogo de Gouveia the elder.
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Mary Lowe Dickinson
1839 - 1914 (75 years)
Mary Lowe Dickinson was a 19th- and early 20th-century American fiction writer, poet, editor, and educator who also became an advocate for women's rights and anti-war activist. Asked later in life about her decision to pursue the writing life, she observed: "Talent uses us.... If I had had a spark of it, I could not have waited for circumstances to force me to use it."
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Johan Wilhelm Zetterstedt
1785 - 1874 (89 years)
Johan Wilhelm Zetterstedt was a Swedish naturalist who worked mainly on Diptera and Hymenoptera. Biography Zetterstedt studied at the University of Lund, where he was a pupil of Anders Jahan Retzius. He received the title of professor in 1822 and succeeded Carl Adolph Agardh as professor of botany and practical economy in 1836, retiring as emeritus in 1853. In 1831, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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Richard Delbrück
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Richard Delbrück was a German classical archaeologist who specialized in the field of ancient Roman portraiture. Career In 1899 he graduated from the University of Bonn, where he was a student of Georg Loeschcke. From 1911 to 1915, he was head of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Rome. He was later a professor of classical archaeology at the Universities of Giessen and Bonn .
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Arthur Kingsley Porter
1883 - 1933 (50 years)
Arthur Kingsley Porter was an American archaeologist, art historian, and medievalist. He was chair of Harvard University’s art history department, and was the first American scholar of Romanesque architecture to achieve international recognition. Porter disappeared in 1933. His most significant scholarly contributions were his revolutionary studies and insights into the spread of Romanesque sculpture. His study of Lombard architecture also remains the first in its class. He left his Cambridge mansion, Elmwood, to Harvard University, where it has served as the official residence of Harvard's p...
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Henry Maundrell
1665 - 1701 (36 years)
Henry Maundrell was an academic at Oxford University and later a Church of England clergyman, who served from 20 December 1695 as chaplain to the Levant Company in Syria. His Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter A.D. 1697 , which had its origins in the diary he carried with him on his Easter pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1697, has become an often reprinted "minor travel classic." It was included in compilations of travel accounts from the mid-18th century, and was translated into three additional languages: French , Dutch and German . By 1749, the seventh edition was printed.
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Charles Hanford Henderson
1861 - 1941 (80 years)
Charles Hanford Henderson was an American educator and author. Biography Born in Philadelphia, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1882; was lecturer at the Franklin Institute 1883–86; Professor of Physics and Chemistry in the Philadelphia Manual Training School 1889–91, principal 1893–95; Ph.D. at Zurich in 1892; lecturer on education at Harvard 1897–98; and director Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, 1898–99.
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Henry Sylvester Jacoby
1857 - 1955 (98 years)
Henry Sylvester Jacoby was an American educator, born at Springtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, He was graduated from Lehigh University in 1877 and during the season of 1878 was connected with the topographical corps of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey. During 1879–85, he was chief draftsman in the United States Engineer's Office in Memphis, Tenn. In 1886, he returned to Lehigh, where until 1890 he was instructor of civil engineering; he then accepted a call to Cornell University, where in 1897 he became professor of bridge engineering. Professor Jacoby was a fellow of the American Ass...
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William H. Bennett
1910 - 1980 (70 years)
William Hunter Bennett was a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1970 until his death. Bennett was born in Taber, Alberta, Canada. He attended the School of Agriculture in Raymond, Alberta, and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in agriculture from Utah State University in the US, followed by a Ph.D. in agriculture from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He joined the faculty of USU as a professor of agronomy.
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Richard Malcolm Johnston
1822 - 1898 (76 years)
Richard Malcolm Johnston was an American author. Biography Johnson was born in Powelton, Hancock County, Georgia. His father was a Baptist minister, and his early education was received at a country school and finished at Mercer University. After graduating there he spent a year teaching and then took up the study of law and was admitted to the bar in 1843. In 1857, he accepted an appointment to the chair of belles-lettres and oratory at the University of Georgia in Athens, retaining it until the opening of the Civil War, when he began a school for boys on his farm near Sparta. This he kept going during the war, serving also for a time on the staff of Confederate general Joseph E.
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