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 History,
#6651
Oskar Loorits
1900 - 1961 (61 years)
Oskar Loorits was an Estonian folklorist. Life Loorits was born in Suure-Kõpu Parish, Viljandi County. He initially studied folklore at the University of Tartu and obtained his doctorate in 1926. Between 1927 and 1941, he was a lecturer in Estonian and Comparative Folklore. Also during that period he was a director of the Estonian Folklore Archives. In 1938 he became a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. In 1944, he fled the Soviet occupation to Sweden and worked there until 1947 as an archive assistant. From then until shortly before his death he held a position in the folk archives of the University of Uppsala.
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William Parker
1821 - 1891 (70 years)
William Parker was an American former slave who escaped from Maryland to Pennsylvania, where he became an abolitionist and anti-slavery activist in Christiana. He was a farmer and led a black self-defense organization. He was notable as a principal figure in the Christiana incident , 1851, also known as the Christiana Resistance. Edward Gorsuch, a Maryland slaveowner who owned four slaves who had fled over the state border to Parker's farm, was killed and other white men in the party to capture the fugitives were wounded. The events brought national attention to the challenges of enforcing th...
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Johann Theodor Katerkamp
1764 - 1834 (70 years)
Johann Theodor Katerkamp was a German Catholic church historian born in Ochtrup. Life Johann Theodor Katerkamp was the son of a wealthy farmer, Johann Heinrich Eberhard and his wife Maria. Johann Theodor received his early education at the Progymnasium of the Franciscan Order in Rheine. In 1781 he went to the Gymnasium Paulinum in Münster. He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Münster from 1783 to 1787.
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Trudpert Neugart
1742 - 1825 (83 years)
Trudpert Neugart was a Benedictine historian. Of middle-class origin, Neugart studied in the classical schools of the Benedictine Abbeys of St George and St. Blasien, entered the order at the latter monastery in l759, and was ordained priest 1765; in 1767 he was appointed professor of Biblical languages at the University of Freiburg. In 1770, however, he returned to St. Blasien where he professed theology.
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Charles Henry Hull
1864 - 1936 (72 years)
Charles Henry Hull was an American economist and historian. He worked at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. In 1900, he was appointed professor of American History. In 1899, he published The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty in two volumes. This edition has become the standard source for referring to the economic writings of Sir William Petty .
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Caroline Skeel
1872 - 1951 (79 years)
Caroline Anne James Skeel was a British historian. She was a professor of history at Westfield College, and is remembered for her work in Welsh social and economic history. The library at Westfield was named after her in 1971.
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Alfons Huber
1834 - 1898 (64 years)
Alfons Huber was an Austrian historian. Life After finishing his gymnasium studies in Hall and Innsbruck, he studied history under Julius von Ficker at the University of Innsbruck . While still young he had become interested in history from Joseph Annegarn's Allgemeine Weltgeschichte. In 1859 he was appointed lecturer of history at Innsbruck, where he became professor in 1863, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in 1867, full member in 1872, and in 1887 professor at the University of Vienna, succeeding Ottokar Lorenz.
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Colin Robert Chase
1935 - 1984 (49 years)
Colin Robert Chase was an American academic. An associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, he was known for his contributions to the studies of Old English and Anglo-Latin literature. His best-known work, The Dating of Beowulf, challenged the accepted orthodoxy of the dating of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf—then thought to be from the latter half of the eighth century—and left behind what was described in A Beowulf Handbook as "a cautious and necessary incertitude".
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Erik Peterson
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Erik Peterson Grandjean was a German Catholic theologian,patrologist and Church historian. Biography Erik Peterson was born in Hamburg. He studied theology from 1910 to 1914 in Strasbourg, Greifswald, Berlin, Basel and Göttingen, where he defended his doctoral dissertation in 1926. He was initially an evangelical Christian influenced by pietism and Søren Kierkegaard. Through the influence of phenomenology in Göttingen, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Hans Lipps, Theodor Haecker, Max Scheler, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Maritain and the Liturgical Movement, he opened up to the Catholic world.
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Jurgis Baltrušaitis
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Jurgis Baltrušaitis was a Lithuanian art historian, art critic and a founder of comparative art research. He was the son of the poet and diplomat Jurgis Baltrušaitis. Most of his works were written in French, although he always stressed his Lithuanian origin. After Lithuania was occupied by the USSR in 1945, he served as a diplomat in exile.
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H. B. Thom
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
Hendrik Bernardus Thom was a Afrikaner professor and former Rector of the Stellenbosch University. Life and career Thom was born in Jamestown, Cape Colony, and grew up in Burgersdorp, South Africa. Because he was the 5th grandchild of his grandfather and namesake with the first names Hendrik Bernardus, his parents decided to call him by the nickname Quintus to distinguish him from his cousins; he was known as Quintie Thom throughout his life. He matriculated at Burgersdorp High School and studied at Stellenbosch University . He continued his studies in history in Germany at the Friedrich Wil...
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Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon
1854 - 1917 (63 years)
Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon was a Norwegian linguist and historian. He was a professor of Semitic Languages at the University of Oslo from 1907. Knudtzon was born in Trondheim, the son of consul Hans Nicolay Knudtzon and his wife Catharina née Trampe. Having finished his secondary education in 1872, he enrolled at the Royal Frederick University in Christiania. After a short spell at the Cathedral School in Trondheim, he returned to Christiania to study Semitic languages, in particular Akkadian, Arabian and Hebrew, the last of which he also gave lectures on. His first scholarly contribution was Textkritische Bemerkungen zu Lay 17,18, which was published in 1882.
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Johannes Isacius Pontanus
1571 - 1639 (68 years)
Johan Isaaksz Pontanus was a Dutch historiographer. Pontanus was the son of Margaretha van Delen and Isaac Pietersz, the Dutch consul to Denmark stationed in Helsingør. The painter Pieter Isaacsz was his older brother. In 1578 his family returned to the Netherlands and Pontanus grew up in Amsterdam. In 1589 he enrolled as a medical student at the University of Franeker and in 1592 at Leiden University as "Joannes Hellespontius Danus", predating the apparent contraction "Pontanus" . The next year he defended his Dissertatio de rationalis animas facilitate and traveled to Rome, visiting German scholars on his return trip.
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Josef Matoušek
1906 - 1939 (33 years)
Josef Matoušek was a Czechoslovak historian. He was one of nine people executed by the Nazis for participating in the funeral of the student Jan Opletal. Biography Matoušek was born on 13 January 1906 in Hořice. He studied under Josef Šusta. His research focused on two periods: the Reformation and early Counter-Reformation, and modern history. He wrote a book, The Turkish War in European Politics in the Years 1592–94. He also published on Karel Sladkovksý, a 19th-century Czech politician. In 1939, he was a docent in history at Charles University in Prague.
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Charles Hardwick
1821 - 1859 (38 years)
Charles Hardwick was an English historian and a priest of the Church of England who became the Archdeacon of Ely. Life Hardwick was born in Slingsby, North Yorkshire, the son of Charles Hardwick, a joiner. After receiving some instruction at Slingsby, Malton, and Sheffield, he acted for a short time as an usher at schools in Thornton and Malton and as an assistant to the Revd Henry Barlow at Shirland rectory in Derbyshire.
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Ivan Duichev
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Ivan Simeonov Duichev was a Bulgarian historian and paleographer with a focus on Bulgarian and Byzantine medieval history. Throughout his scientific and research life he has followed the maxim of his teacher Vasil Zlatarski that Bulgarian history is inextricably linked and incomprehensible without Byzantine history. Adopted as the father of Bulgarian archival studies.
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Charles VIII of Sweden
1409 - 1470 (61 years)
Charles VIII , contemporaneously known as Charles II and called Charles I in Norwegian context, was king of Sweden and king of Norway . Regnal name Charles was the second Swedish king by the name of Charles . Charles VIII is a posthumous invention, counting backwards from Charles IX who adopted his numeral according to a fictitious history of Sweden. Six others before Charles VII are unknown to any sources before Johannes Magnus's 16th century book , and are considered his invention. Charles was the first Swedish monarch of the name to actually use a regnal number as Charles II , on his wife...
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Frédéric de Reiffenberg
1795 - 1850 (55 years)
Frédéric Auguste Ferdinand Thomas de Reiffenberg was a baron, Belgian writer, historian-medievalist, and linguist. He was also a member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium, as well as a member of the Academic Senate and professor at the State University of Leuven.
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Charles Wendell David
1885 - 1984 (99 years)
Charles Wendell David was a noted American bibliophile, medievalist and librarian. He worked tirelessly both to reconstruct Europe's war-torn repositories and to establish new libraries in the United States.
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Silas Marcus MacVane
1842 - 1914 (72 years)
Silas Marcus MacVane was a Canadian-American historian, the McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard University starting in 1887 after the death of Ephraim Whitman Gurney . He was a professor at Harvard from 1873 until 1911.
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Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Ferland
1805 - 1865 (60 years)
Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Ferland was a French Canadian historian. Life He studied at the college of Nicolet and was ordained 1828. He ministered to country parishes until 1841, when he was made director of studies in the college of Nicolet. He became its superior in 1848. Being named a member of the council of the Bishop of Quebec, he took up his residence in that city, where he was also chaplain to the English garrison. From his college days he had devoted himself to the study of Canadian history; the numerous notes which he collected had made him one of the most learned men of the country. It ...
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Herman Daniel Paul
1827 - 1885 (58 years)
Herman Daniel Paul was a German-born musician and lecturer in German at the University of Helsinki, who translated the Kalevala into German, among other works. Life Paul's father was a government councilor, Johann Paul, and his mother was Dorothea Paul. He attended high school in Berlin, studied music, and then held various positions in music, circling the violin countries of the Baltic Sea region from 1858 to 1862. Paul moved to Helsinki in 1859, founded a music store there in 1862 and worked as a concert reviewer. He was an adjunct professor of German at the University of Helsinki from 1869 to 1885 and taught German and Russian at various educational institutions in Helsinki.
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Adolf Chybiński
1880 - 1952 (72 years)
Adolf Chybiński was a Polish historian, musicologist, and academic. Early life and education Adolf Eustachy Chybiński was the son of the industrialist Adolf and Maria z Górskich. He was educated at a gymnasium in Kraków, and studied German, classical philology and law at Jagiellonian University .
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Friedrich Rühs
1781 - 1820 (39 years)
Friedrich Rühs was a German historian of Scandinavian and Germanic history. At the time of the Liberation War he wrote xenophobic anti-French and anti-Jewish nationalist texts, and is seen as a forerunner of volkish antisemitism.
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Eugenio Manni
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Eugenio Manni was an Italian ancient historian. Having graduated from the University of Turin, he specialised at the end of the 1940s in ancient history, particularly ancient Greece, Rome and the history of Sicily in the period before the Greeks.
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Wilhelm Erben
1864 - 1933 (69 years)
Wilhelm Erben was an Austrian historian, known for his work in the field of auxiliary sciences of history and his studies involving the history of medieval warfare. He studied history at the University of Vienna, and from 1885 studied with Theodor von Sickel at the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung in Vienna. From 1888 to 1891 he was an employee of the Monumenta Germaniae historica, and afterwards, served as curator at the Imperial Army Museum in Vienna. In 1901 he qualified as a lecturer, and two years later was named professor of medieval history and historical auxiliary sciences at the University of Innsbruck.
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Siegfried Hirsch
1816 - 1860 (44 years)
Siegfried Hirsch was a German historian who was a native of Berlin. He was a cousin to historian Theodor Hirsch . From 1833 to 1836 he was a student at the Universities of Berlin and Königsberg. While a student he published an award-winning essay on King Henry I called Das Leben und die Thaten König Heinrichs I . A few years later he was co-author with Georg Waitz on the publication of "Die Echtheit der Chronik von Korvei.
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Gianfranco Faina
Gianfranco Faina was an Italian professor. His early experiences were first in the communist party, following his departure from which he participated in many political groups such as the "workers-students league" where the separation between workers and intellectuals was eliminated. He had a pivotal role in the creation of Italian Operaism Movements.
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Alexander Johnston
1849 - 1889 (40 years)
Alexander Johnston was an American historian. Biography He was born in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, graduated from Rutgers College in 1870, and was admitted to the bar in 1875 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he taught in the Rutgers College Grammar School from 1876 to 1879.
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Johann Gottlob Böhme
1717 - 1780 (63 years)
Johann Gottlob Böhme was a German historian. Beginning in 1736 he studied history at the University of Leipzig. In 1747 he acquired his magister degree at Leipzig, where four years later he became an associate professor at the faculty of philosophy. In 1758 he succeeded Christian Gottlieb Jöcher as professor of history at the university.
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Renat Nelli
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Renat Nelli , who was born in Carcassonne, Aude in 1906 and died in 1982, was one of the major Occitan writers of the 20th century. In Vichy France, Nelli joined the French Resistance and in 1945 was one of the co-founders of the Institut d'Estudis Occitans. He also co-wrote the special issue of the Cahiers du Sud magazine on "the Genius of Òc and the Mediterranean Man" , in which the three main lines of his literary mission stand out: the publication and translation of medieval Occitan poets; publishing his own poems; and being a critic. His collections are marked with sensuality and draw their inspiration from the mystical traditions of Cathars and trobadors.
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Sigurd Abel
1837 - 1873 (36 years)
Sigurd Abel was a German historian from Stuttgart. Education Abel visited the seminary of Maulbronn and the college of Stuttgart. He then followed the steps of his cousin Heinrich Friedrich Otto Abel and began studying history in Jena, Bonn, Göttingen and Berlin. He earned his doctorate in summer 1859 with the historian Georg Waitz in Göttingen.
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Rosalind Tanner
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Rosalind Cecilia Hildegard Tanner was a mathematician and historian of mathematics. She was the eldest daughter of the mathematicians Grace and William Young. She was born and lived in Göttingen in Germany until 1908. During her life she used the name Cecily.
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Karl Bomansson
1827 - 1906 (79 years)
Karl August Bomansson , was a Finnish historian and archivist. Between 1870 and 1883 he was chief archivist at the National Archives of Finland. From 1862 he was associate professor in history at Helsinki University.
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George Johnston Allman
1824 - 1904 (80 years)
George Johnston Allman was an Irish professor, mathematician, classical scholar, and historian of ancient Greek mathematics. His fame rests mainly upon his authorship of Greek Geometry from Thales to Euclid, first published in Dublin in 1889, and republished several times subsequently.
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Clas Theodor Odhner
1836 - 1904 (68 years)
Clas Jonas Theodor Odhner was a Swedish historian, and director of the Swedish National Archives . The son of a clergyman, Odhner's mother was a sister of Nils Ericson and John Ericsson. Odhner went to school in Skara and matriculated at Uppsala University in 1851, completing the degree of filosofie magister and becoming a docent of History in 1860. He taught at Lund University from 1865, as professor of history from 1870 until 1887, when he was appointed riksarkivarie, director of the National Archives, a position where he remained until 1901. Odhner was a member of the Second Chamber of the Riksdag 1894–1897.
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R. Carlyle Buley
1893 - 1968 (75 years)
Roscoe Carlyle Buley was an American historian and educator. Personal life and educational background The son of David M. Buley, a school teacher from Indiana, and Nora Buley, he graduated from Vincennes Lincoln High School in 1910. He received his B.A. from Indiana University in 1914 and his M.A. from the same institution in 1916.
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Ferdinand Rosenberger
1846 - 1899 (53 years)
Johann Karl Ferdinand Rosenberger was a German science historian who specialized in the history of physics. Rosenberger was born in Lobeda near Jena and although interested in music, trained as a teacher and taught at an elementary school before taking up higher studies at the University of Jena. After receiving a PhD in 1870 he taught mathematics and natural science at private schools before moving to Frankfurt am Main in 1877 to teach at the Realgymnasium. He was made professor in 1893 and continued to work here until his death. He was elected member of the Leopoldina Academy in 1892. He began to study the history of mathematics in 1876 and later physics.
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Melchior Goldast
1578 - 1635 (57 years)
Melchior Goldast von Haiminsfeld was a Swiss jurist and an industrious though uncritical collector of documents relating to the medieval history and constitution of Germany and was the first to coin the term medieval . He was a Calvinist writer of note.
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James Wightman Davidson
1915 - 1973 (58 years)
James Wightman Davidson was a New Zealand historian and constitutional adviser. Professor of Pacific History at the Australian National University from 1950 to 1973, Davidson was the "founding father of modern Pacific Islands historiography as well as constitutional adviser to a succession of Island territories in the throes of decolonisation".
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William Mackay Mackenzie
1871 - 1952 (81 years)
William Mackay Mackenzie was a Scottish historian, archaeologist and writer, who was Secretary of the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland between 1913 and 1935, and also an expert on folk-lore. He was born in Cromarty, graduated with an MA from the University of Edinburgh and taught at Glasgow Academy between 1896 and 1912. He also had a DLitt.
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Eduard Richter
1847 - 1905 (58 years)
Eduard Richter was an Austrian geographer and glaciologist. Biography He studied history and geography at the University of Vienna, where his instructors included Theodor von Sickel and Friedrich Simony. From 1871 to 1886 he was a gymnasium teacher in Salzburg, and in 1886 became a professor of geography at the University of Graz. In 1895 he traveled to Norway in order to conduct glaciological studies.
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John Rouse Bloxam
1807 - 1891 (84 years)
John Rouse Bloxam was an English academic and clergyman, the historian of Magdalen College, Oxford. Life Born at Rugby on 25 April 1807, he was the sixth son of Richard Rouse Bloxam, D.D. , under-master of Rugby School for 38 years, and rector of Brinklow and vicar of Bulkington, both in Warwickshire, who married Ann, sister of Sir Thomas Lawrence. All the six sons were foundationers at Rugby School, and all attended, as chief mourners, the funeral of Lawrence in St Paul's Cathedral.
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Raymond Beazley
1868 - 1955 (87 years)
Sir Charles Raymond Beazley was a British historian. He was Professor of History at the University of Birmingham from 1909 to 1933. Born in Blackheath, he was the son of Rev. Joseph and Louisa Beazley. He was educated at St Paul's School, King's College London and Balliol College, Oxford. His academic career was as a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, until his chair at Birmingham.
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Ella Sophia Armitage
1841 - 1931 (90 years)
Ella Sophia Armitage was an English historian and archaeologist. Life Armitage was born Ella Sophia Bulley in Liverpool, the second daughter of Samuel Marshall Bulley, a cotton merchant, and Mary Rachel Raffles, daughter of Congregational minister Thomas Raffles. In October 1871 she was one of the first students to enter Newnham College, Cambridge. Two of her sisters also attended Newnham, including Amy Bulley who sat the tripos. A brother was Arthur Bulley.
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Tang Yongtong
1893 - 1964 (71 years)
Tang Yongtong was a Chinese educator, philosopher and scholar best known for studying Chinese Buddhism. Tang was proficient in Sanskrit, Pali, English and Japanese. Tang attended the Tsinghua School and Shuntian School before he pursued advanced studies in the United States. While studying at Harvard University, he became known as "one of the three Outstanding Persons of Harvard" along with Chen Yinke and Wu Mi.
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Allen Johnson
1870 - 1931 (61 years)
Allen Johnson was an American historian, teacher, biographer, and editor of the Dictionary of American Biography. Early life and education Johnson was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, where his father, Moses Allen Johnson worked for the Lowell Felting Mills. His mother was Elmira Shattuck. Johnson was the valedictorian of his high school in 1888, and then attended Amherst College, graduating in 1892.
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Zhu Qianzhi
1899 - 1972 (73 years)
Zhu Qianzhi was a Chinese intellectual, translator and historian.
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Johan Schreiner
1903 - 1967 (64 years)
Johan Christian Schreiner was a Norwegian historian. He was a professor at the University of Oslo, and his speciality was the Middle Ages. Personal life He was born in Drøbak as a son of historian Kristian Schreiner and physician and anthropologist Alette Schreiner , and grew up in Kristiania. He was married briefly to his youth friend, later editor, Minister of Social Affairs, and member of Parliament Kirsten Hansteen, from 1928, and from 1930 he was married to Astri Høst. While he was a student he was a member of the radical political organization Mot Dag.
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Nikoloz Janashia
1931 - 1982 (51 years)
Nikoloz Janashia was a famous Georgian historian and public benefactor, PhD in History , associate professor . Janashia born in Tbilisi, son of a noted Georgian historian Simon Janashia . In 1954, Janashia graduated from the faculty of history of the Tbilisi State University.
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