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 History,
#6501
G. D. H. Cole
1889 - 1959 (70 years)
George Douglas Howard Cole was an English political theorist, economist, and historian. As a believer in common ownership of the means of production, he theorised guild socialism . He belonged to the Fabian Society and was an advocate for the co-operative movement.
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Vasil Kanchov
1862 - 1902 (40 years)
Vasil Kanchov was a geographer, ethnographer and teacher who served as Minister of Education of Bulgaria. Early life and education Vasil Kanchov was born in Vratsa. Upon graduating from High school in Lom, Bulgaria, and later he entered the University of Harkov, then in the Russian empire. During the Serbo-Bulgarian War 1885 he suspended his education and took part in the war. Later, he went on to pursue studies at universities in Munich and Stuttgart, but in 1888 he interrupted his education again due to an illness.
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Frederic William Maitland
1850 - 1906 (56 years)
Frederic William Maitland was an English historian and jurist who is regarded as the modern father of English legal history. From 1884 until his death in 1906, he was reader in English law, then Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge.
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Theodor Schieder
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Theodor Schieder was an influential mid-20th century German historian. Born in Oettingen, Western Bavaria, he relocated to Königsberg in East Prussia in 1934 at the age of 26. [p. 56] He joined the Nazi Party in 1937. During the Nazi era, Schieder became part of a group of German conservative historians antagonistic towards the Weimar Republic. He pursued a racially-oriented social history , and warned about the supposed dangers of Germans mixing with other nations. During this time, Schieder used ethnographic methods to justify German supremacy and expansion. He was the author of the "Memora...
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Pierre Duhem
1861 - 1916 (55 years)
Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem was a French theoretical physicist who worked on thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and the theory of elasticity. Duhem was also a historian of science, noted for his work on the European Middle Ages, which is regarded as having created the field of the history of medieval science. As a philosopher of science, he is remembered principally for his views on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria .
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Albert Soboul
1914 - 1982 (68 years)
Albert Marius Soboul was a historian of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. A professor at the Sorbonne, he was chair of the History of the French Revolution and author of numerous influential works of history and historical interpretation. In his lifetime, he was internationally recognized as the foremost French authority on the Revolutionary era.
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Hans Rothfels
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Hans Rothfels was a German nationalist conservative historian. He supported an idea of authoritarian German state, dominance of Germany over Europe and was hostile to Germany's eastern neighbours. After his applications for honorary Aryan status were rejected, due to his Jewish ancestry and increased persecution of Jewish people by Nazis, he was forced to emigrate to the United Kingdom and later to the United States during the Second World War, after which he became opposed to the Nazi regime. Rothfels returned to West Germany after 1945 where he continued to influence history teaching and be...
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Nicolae Bălcescu
1819 - 1852 (33 years)
Nicolae Bălcescu was a Romanian Wallachian soldier, historian, journalist, and leader of the 1848 Wallachian Revolution. Early life Born in Bucharest to a family of low-ranking nobility, he used his mother's maiden name, in place of his father's name, Petrescu . His siblings were Costache, Barbu, Sevasta and Marghioala, and his father died in 1824.
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Ephorus
400 BC - 330 BC (70 years)
Ephorus of Cyme was an ancient Greek historian known for his universal history. Biography Information on his biography is limited. He was born in Cyme, Aeolia, and together with the historian Theopompus was a pupil of Isocrates in rhetoric. He does not seem to have made much progress as a speaker, and at the suggestion of Isocrates himself he took up literary composition and the study of history. According to Plutarch, Ephorus declined Alexander the Great's offer to join him on his Persian campaign as the official historiographer. His son Demophilus followed in his footsteps as a historian.
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František Graus
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
František Graus was a Czech historian whose work focused on the social and economic history of medieval Europe, particularly the history of social movements and of ethnic and religious minorities. Life and academic career Born to a prosperous German-speaking Jewish family in Brno in 1921, the young Graus was interned at Theresienstadt during World War II and lost most of his family in the Holocaust. Following the war, he returned to Prague, where he completed his degree in at the Charles University and began teaching medieval history at the Czech state Academy of Sciences. Following the Pragu...
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Mōri Motonari
1497 - 1571 (74 years)
Mōri Motonari was a prominent daimyō in the western Chūgoku region of Japan during the Sengoku period of the 16th century. The Mōri clan claimed descent from Ōe no Hiromoto , an adviser to Minamoto no Yoritomo. Motonari was called the "Beggar Prince". He was known as a great strategist who began as a small local warlord of Aki Province and extended his clan's power to nearly all of the Chūgoku region through war, marriage, adoption and assassination.
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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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Michiel de Ruyter
1607 - 1676 (69 years)
Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter was a Dutch admiral. His achievements with the Dutch Navy during the Anglo-Dutch Wars earned him the reputation as one of the most skilled naval commanders in history.
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Howard K. Beale
1899 - 1959 (60 years)
Howard Kennedy Beale was an American historian. He had several temporary appointments before becoming a professor of history at the University of North Carolina in 1935. His most famous student was C. Vann Woodward, who adopted the Beard-Beale approach to Reconstruction. He went to the University of Wisconsin in 1948, where he directed many dissertations. He specialized in nineteenth and twentieth-century American history, particularly the Reconstruction Era, and the foreign policy of the early 20th century. He was a noted civil libertarian and advocate for academic freedom.
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Cornelius Nepos
100 BC - 25 BC (75 years)
Cornelius Nepos was a Roman biographer. He was born at Hostilia, a village in Cisalpine Gaul not far from Verona. Biography Nepos's Cisalpine birth is attested by Ausonius, and Pliny the Elder calls him Padi accola . He was a friend of Catullus, who dedicates his poems to him , Cicero and Titus Pomponius Atticus. Eusebius places him in the fourth year of the reign of Augustus, which is supposed to be when he began to attract critical acclaim by his writing. Pliny the Elder notes he died in the reign of Augustus .
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Kenneth Dike
1917 - 1983 (66 years)
Kenneth Onwuka Dike was a Nigerian educationist, historian and the first Nigerian Vice-Chancellor of the nation's premier college, the University of Ibadan. During the Nigerian civil war, he moved to Harvard University. He was a founder of the Ibadan School that dominated the writing of the History of Nigeria until the 1970s. He is credited with "having played the leading role in creating a generation of African historians who could interpret their own history without being influenced by Eurocentric approaches."
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Joseph Klausner
1874 - 1958 (84 years)
Joseph Gedaliah Klausner , was a Lithuanian-born Israeli historian and professor of Hebrew literature. He was the chief redactor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica. He was a candidate for president in the first Israeli presidential election in 1949, losing to Chaim Weizmann. Klausner was the great uncle of Israeli author Amos Oz.
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Constantius Chlorus
250 - 306 (56 years)
Flavius Valerius Constantius "Chlorus" , also called Constantius I, was Roman emperor from 305 to 306. He was one of the four original members of the Tetrarchy established by Diocletian, first serving as caesar from 293 to 305 and then ruling as augustus until his death. Constantius was also father of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome. The nickname Chlorus was first popularized by Byzantine-era historians and not used during the emperor's lifetime.
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Andreas Alföldi
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
András Ede Zsigmond Alföldi was a Hungarian historian, art historian, epigraphist, numismatist and archaeologist, specializing in the Late Antique period. He was one of the most productive 20th-century scholars of the ancient world and is considered one of the leading researchers of his time. Although some of his research results are controversial, his work in several areas is viewed as groundbreaking.
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John Addington Symonds
1840 - 1893 (53 years)
John Addington Symonds Jr. was an English poet and literary critic. A cultural historian, he was known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as numerous biographies of writers and artists. Although married with children, Symonds supported male love , which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, referring to it as l'amour de l'impossible . He also wrote much poetry inspired by his same-sex affairs.
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George Lincoln Burr
1857 - 1938 (81 years)
George Lincoln Burr was a US historian, diplomat, author, and educator, best known as a Professor of History and Librarian at Cornell University, and as the closest collaborator of Andrew Dickson White, the first President of Cornell.
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Nikolai Mashkin
1900 - 1950 (50 years)
Nikolai Alexandrovich Mashkin was a Soviet scholar of Roman history . Mashkin authored The History of Ancient Rome , which was translated into several languages, and The Principate of Augustus. Its Origin and Social Essence . In 1950 Mashkin received the Stalin Prize.
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Abigail Adams
1744 - 1818 (74 years)
Abigail Adams was the wife and closest advisor of John Adams, as well as the mother of John Quincy Adams. She was a founder of the United States, and was both the first second lady and second first lady of the United States, although such titles were not used at the time. She and Barbara Bush are the only two women to have been married to U.S. presidents and to have been the mothers of other U.S. presidents.
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Guglielmo Ferrero
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Guglielmo Ferrero was an Italian historian, journalist and novelist, author of the Greatness and Decline of Rome . Ferrero devoted his writings to classical liberalism and he opposed any kind of dictatorship and unlimited government.
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Casimir III the Great
1310 - 1370 (60 years)
Casimir III the Great reigned as the King of Poland from 1333 to 1370. He also later became King of Ruthenia in 1340, and fought to retain the title in the Galicia-Volhynia Wars. He was the last Polish king from the Piast dynasty.
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John Foxe
1516 - 1587 (71 years)
John Foxe was an English clergyman, theologian, and historian, notable for his martyrology Actes and Monuments , telling of Christian martyrs throughout Western history, but particularly the sufferings of English Protestants and proto-Protestants from the 14th century and in the reign of Mary I. The book was widely owned and read by English Puritans and helped to mould British opinion on the Catholic Church for several centuries.
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Herbert Eugene Bolton
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
Herbert Eugene Bolton was an American historian who pioneered the study of the Spanish-American borderlands and was a prominent authority on Spanish American history. He originated what became known as the Bolton Theory of the history of the Americas which holds that it is impossible to study the history of the United States in isolation from the histories of other American nations, and wrote or co-authored ninety-four works. A student of Frederick Jackson Turner, Bolton disagreed with his mentor's Frontier theory and argued that the history of the Americas is best understood by taking a holi...
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Vladimir Sergeyevich Sergeyev
1883 - 1941 (58 years)
Vladimir Sergeyevich Sergeyev was a Soviet historian of classical antiquity. During 1934-41 Sergeev served as the head of Department of Ancient History at the Moscow State University and the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. During 1936-41 worked in the Institute of History Soviet Academy of Sciences. Sergeev concentrated on the history of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome and was author of the first Soviet textbooks about this topic.
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Inca Garcilaso de la Vega
1539 - 1616 (77 years)
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega , born Gómez Suárez de Figueroa and known as El Inca, was a chronicler and writer born in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Sailing to Spain at 21, he was educated informally there, where he lived and worked the rest of his life. The natural son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman born in the early years of the conquest, he is known primarily for his chronicles of Inca history, culture, and society. His work was widely read in Europe, influential and well received. It was the first literature by an author born in the Americas to enter the western canon.
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Fletcher Pratt
1897 - 1956 (59 years)
Murray Fletcher Pratt was an American writer of history, science fiction, and fantasy. He is best known for his works on naval history and the American Civil War and for fiction written with L. Sprague de Camp.
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Werner Conze
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Werner Conze was a German historian. Georg Iggers refers to him as "one of the most important historians and mentors of the post-1945 generation of West German historians." Beginning in 1998, Conze's role during the Third Reich and his successful postwar career in spite of this became a subject of great controversy among German historians.
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D. G. E. Hall
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Daniel George Edward Hall was a British historian, writer, and academic. He wrote extensively on the history of Burma. His most notable work is A History of Southeast Asia, said to "...remain the most important single history of the region, providing encyclopedic coverage of material published up to the time of its 1981 revision." He held professorships in Southeast Asian history at both Cornell University and the University of London – where he eventually became professor emeritus.
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William H. Prescott
1796 - 1859 (63 years)
William Hickling Prescott was an American historian and Hispanist, who is widely recognized by historiographers to have been the first American scientific historian. Despite having serious visual impairment, which at times prevented him from reading or writing for himself, Prescott became one of the most eminent historians of 19th century America. He is also noted for his eidetic memory.
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Robert Mandrou
1921 - 1984 (63 years)
Robert Mandrou , was a French historian, one of the members of the Annales School and the secretary to its journal Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale . He was also, with Georges Duby one of the pioneers of what Annaliste historians in the 1970s and 80's came to call the "history of mentalities".
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G. G. Coulton
1858 - 1947 (89 years)
George Gordon Coulton was a British historian, known for numerous works on medieval history. He was known also as a keen controversialist. Coulton was born in King's Lynn and educated at King's Lynn Grammar School, Felsted School, and St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
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John of Fordun
1301 - 1384 (83 years)
John of Fordun was a Scottish chronicler. It is generally stated that he was born at Fordoun, Mearns. It is certain that he was a secular priest, and that he composed his history in the latter part of the 14th century. It is probable that he was a chaplain in St Machar's Cathedral of Aberdeen.
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Simon Janashia
1900 - 1947 (47 years)
Simon Janashia was a Georgian historian and public figure. He was a professor of history and one of the founding members of the Georgian Academy of Sciences. Janashia was born in 1900, in Makvaneti in the southwestern Georgian province of Guria. His father, Nikoloz Janashia , was an educator and ethnographer, born in Abkhazia. In 1922, Simon Janashia graduated from the Tbilisi State University. From 1924 to 1947, he served as a lecturer , Associate Professor and Professor there. In 1941, he was one of the founders of the Georgian Academy of Sciences , and from 1941 to 1947, he was Vice-President of the Academy and Director of the Institute of History of the GAS.
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Constantine V
718 - 775 (57 years)
Constantine V was Byzantine emperor from 741 to 775. His reign saw a consolidation of Byzantine security from external threats. As an able military leader, Constantine took advantage of civil war in the Muslim world to make limited offensives on the Arab frontier. With this eastern frontier secure, he undertook repeated campaigns against the Bulgars in the Balkans. His military activity, and policy of settling Christian populations from the Arab frontier in Thrace, made Byzantium's hold on its Balkan territories more secure.
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Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley
1760 - 1842 (82 years)
Richard Colley Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, was an Anglo-Irish politician and colonial administrator. He was styled as Viscount Wellesley until 1781, when he succeeded his father as 2nd Earl of Mornington. In 1799, he was granted the Irish peerage title of Marquess Wellesley. He was also Lord Wellesley in the Peerage of Great Britain.
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Judas Maccabeus
Judah Maccabee was a Jewish priest and a son of the priest Mattathias. He led the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire . The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah commemorates the restoration of Jewish worship at the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 164 BCE, after Judah Maccabee removed all of the statues depicting Greek gods and goddesses and purified it.
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Niharranjan Ray
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Niharranjan Ray was an Indian Bengali historian, well known for his works on the history of art and Indian history. Early life and education He was born on 14 January 1903 at Kayetgram village of Mymensingh District in Bengal province of British India . He completed his initial studies from the Mrityunjaya School and Ananda Mohan College in Mymensingh. In 1924, he passed his B.A. examination in History from Murari Chand College, Sylhet. In 1926, he stood first in the M.A. examination in Ancient Indian History and Culture from the University of Calcutta. He received the Mrinalini Gold Medal in the same year for his Political History of Northern India, AD 600-900.
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Seneca the Elder
54 BC - 39 (93 years)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Elder , also known as Seneca the Rhetorician, was a Roman writer, born of a wealthy equestrian family of Corduba, Hispania. He wrote a collection of reminiscences about the Roman schools of rhetoric, six books of which are extant in a more or less complete state and five others in epitome only. His principal work, a history of Roman affairs from the beginning of the Civil Wars until the last years of his life, is almost entirely lost to posterity. Seneca lived through the reigns of three significant emperors; Augustus , Tiberius and Caligula . He was the father of Lu...
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Ludwig Dehio
1888 - 1963 (75 years)
Ludwig Dehio was a German archivist and historian. Dehio was born in Königsberg, the son of art historian Georg Dehio. He studied philosophy, philology and history at the University of Strasbourg and received his doctorate in 1912. Later in his career he served as Staatsarchivrat at the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin. From 1945 to 1954 he was director of the Hessian state archives in Marburg. He was catalyst in the founding of the "archives school" in Marburg.
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Pulakeshin II
610 - 642 (32 years)
Pulakeshin II populary known as Immadi Pulakeshi, was the greatest Chalukyan Emperor who reigned from Vatapi . During his reign, the Chalukya Empire expanded to cover most of the Deccan region in peninsular India.
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Alexey Okladnikov
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Alexey Pavlovich Okladnikov was a Soviet archaeologist, historian, and ethnographer, an expert in the ancient cultures of Siberia and the Pacific Basin. He was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1968, and awarded the honorary title of the Hero of Socialist Labor . The childhood of the scientist took place in Biryulka village in Siberia. From 1938 to 1961, Okladnikov worked in the Leningrad Division of the Archeology Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
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Kan'ichi Asakawa
1873 - 1948 (75 years)
Kan'ichi Asakawa was a Japanese academic, author, historian, curator and peace advocate. Asakawa was Japanese by birth and citizenship though he lived the majority of his life in the United States. Early life and education Asakawa was born in Nihonmatsu, Japan, on December 20, 1873. He was educated at the Fukushima-ken Jinjo School in Fukushima Prefecture and at Waseda University in Tokyo before he traveled to the United States to study at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. There, he was awarded his Bachelor of Letters degree in 1899. He continued his studies at Yale University, ea...
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Ekvtime Takaishvili
1863 - 1953 (90 years)
Ekvtime Takaishvili was a Georgian historian, archaeologist and public benefactor. Born in the village of Likhauri in the western Georgian province of Guria to a local nobleman Svimon Takaishvili, he graduated from St. Petersburg University in 1887. From 1887 to 1917, he lectured on the history of Georgia at various prestigious schools in Tbilisi, including the Tbilisi Gymnasium for Nobility. During these years, he was actively involved in extensive scholarly activities and chaired, from 1907 to 1921, the Society of History and Ethnography of Georgia. Between 1907 and 1910, he organized a s...
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Charles Diehl
1859 - 1944 (85 years)
Charles Diehl was a French historian born in Strasbourg. He was a leading authority on Byzantine art and history. Biography He received his education at the École Normale Supérieure, and later taught classes on Byzantine history at the Sorbonne. He was member of the École française de Rome and the École française d'Athènes. In 1910, he became a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres .
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Ilya Ehrenburg
1891 - 1967 (76 years)
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, revolutionary, journalist and historian. Ehrenburg was among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist – in particular, as a reporter in three wars . His incendiary articles calling for violence against Germans during the Great Patriotic War won him a huge following among front-line Soviet soldiers, but also caused much controversy due to their perceived anti-German sentiment. Ehrenburg later clarified that his writings wer...
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Frederic C. Lane
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Frederic C. Lane was a historian who specialized in Medieval history with a particular emphasis on the region of Venice. Early life, education, and family The son of Alfred Church Lane and his wife Susanne Foster Lane, Frederic Lane received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1921, his M.A. from Tufts College in 1922, where he wrote a master's thesis on "The economic history of Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century", and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1930 with a doctoral thesis on "Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries." He began hi...
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