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,
#6701
Cyrus Adler
1863 - 1940 (77 years)
Cyrus Adler was an American educator, Jewish religious leader and scholar. Early years Adler was born to merchant and planter Samuel Adler and Sarah Sulzberger in Van Buren, Arkansas on September 13, 1863, but in the next year his parents removed to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and soon he attended the public schools there, and in 1879 he entered the University of Pennsylvania, where graduated in 1883. He afterwards pursued Oriental studies in Johns Hopkins University, was appointed university scholar there in 1884, and was fellow in Semitic languages from 1885 to 1887, when he gained the firs...
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Alexander Brückner
1834 - 1896 (62 years)
Alexander Brückner was a Baltic German historian who specialized in Russian studies. He was the father of geographer Eduard Brückner. He studied history and economics at the universities of Heidelberg, Jena and Berlin, receiving his doctorate in Heidelberg with a dissertation on the history of the Diet of Worms . As a student, his instructors included Johann Gustav Droysen, Ludwig Häusser, Leopold von Ranke and Friedrich von Raumer. From 1861 to 1867 he served as a professor of history at the Imperial Law School in St. Petersburg, and afterwards was a professor of history at the universities ...
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King Zhou of Shang
1105 BC - 1046 BC (59 years)
King Zhou was the pejorative posthumous name given to Di Xin of Shang or King Shou of Shang , the last king of the Shang dynasty of ancient China. He is also called Zhou Xin . In Chinese, his name Zhòu also refers to a horse crupper, the part of a saddle or harness that is most likely to be soiled by the horse. It is not to be confused with the name of the succeeding dynasty, which has a different character and pronunciation .
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Friedrich Baethgen
1890 - 1972 (82 years)
Friedrich Jürgen Baethgen was a German historian born in Greifswald. He specialized in medieval studies and in history of the papacy. He studied history at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, earning his doctorate in 1913 under the guidance of Karl Hampe with a thesis on Pope Innocent III. Afterwards, he was a lecturer and associate professor at Heidelberg, then becoming a professor of history at the University of Königsberg . From 1939 to 1948 he taught classes in Berlin.
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Raphael Mahler
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Raphael Mahler was a Galician-born Jewish historian who worked in Poland, America, and Israel. Life Mahler was born on August 15, 1899, in Nowy Sącz, Galicia, Austria-Hungary, the son of a scholarly and business family. He attended the Nowy Sącz municipal public school, where he was the only Jewish student, went to the Nowy Sącz yeshiva, and studied with private tutors.
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William Milligan Sloane
1850 - 1928 (78 years)
William Milligan Sloane was an American educator and historian. Career William Milligan Sloane was born in Richmond, Ohio on November 12, 1850. He graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University, where he was a member of the Philolexian Society, in 1868, and afterward was employed as instructor in classics at the Newell School in Pittsburgh until 1872. From 1872 to 1876 he studied at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig. He studied history under Mommsen and Droysen, and much of the time he worked as private secretary to George Bancroft, United States Minister at Berlin. He received a...
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Herbert Dingle
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Herbert Dingle was an English physicist and philosopher of science, who served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 to 1953. He is best known for his opposition to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity and the protracted controversy that this provoked.
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Alcée Fortier
1856 - 1914 (58 years)
Alcée Fortier was a renowned Professor of Romance Languages at Tulane University in New Orleans. In the late 19th and early 20th century, he published numerous works on language, literature, Louisiana history and folklore, Louisiana Creole languages, and personal reminiscence. He had French Creole ancestry dating to the colonial period.
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Alois Vojtěch Šembera
1807 - 1882 (75 years)
Alois Vojtěch Šembera, also Alois Adalbert Sembera or Alois Adalbert Schembera was a Czech linguist, historian of literature, writer, journalist and patriot. Life and work He was born in Vysoké Mýto, Bohemia, Austrian Empire. During 1819–1826 he studied at the gymnasium in Litomyšl, during 1826/27 philology at the Charles University in Prague and then law at the same university .
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Harry Bresslau
1848 - 1926 (78 years)
Harry Bresslau was a German historian and scholar of state papers and of historical and literary muniments . He was born in Dannenberg/Elbe and died in Heidelberg. He is the father of Ernst Bresslau and his daughter, Helene married the polymath, Albert Schweitzer.
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Xu Fuguan
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Hsu Fu-kuan or Xu Fuguan ; 1902/03 – 1982 Biography Xu was born in 1902 or 1903 in a family of farmers and scholars in Hubei Province, China. Hsu's father taught at a private school established for village children who showed academic promise and could sit the imperial examinations to become scholar officials. In his teen-age years, Xu made his way to the provincial capital Wuhan which was then the cultural center where foreign influences and trends abounded. Wuhan was also an important staging area for the 1911 Republican Revolution that ended China's 2000-year-old imperial rule. Xu spent fifteen years with the Nationalist army attaining the rank of senior colonel.
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William Dodd
1869 - 1940 (71 years)
William Edward Dodd was an American historian, author and diplomat. A liberal Democrat, he served as the United States Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937 during the Nazi era. Initially a holder of the slightly antisemitic notions of his times, he went to Germany with instructions from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to do what he could to protest Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany "unofficially," while also attempting to follow official State Department instructions to maintain cordial official diplomatic relations. Convinced from firsthand observation that the Nazis were an increasing t...
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Anne Hyde
1637 - 1671 (34 years)
Anne Hyde was the first wife of James, Duke of York, who later became King James II and VII. Anne was the daughter of a member of the English gentry—Edward Hyde —and met her future husband when they were both living in exile in the Netherlands. She married James in 1660 and two months later gave birth to the couple's first child, who had been conceived out of wedlock. Some observers disapproved of the marriage, but James's brother, King Charles II of England, wanted the marriage to take place. Another cause of disapproval was the public affection James showed toward Anne. They had eight child...
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Nugroho Notosusanto
1930 - 1985 (55 years)
Brigadier General Raden Panji Nugroho Notosusanto was an Indonesian short story writer turned military historian who served as professor of history at the University of Indonesia. Born to a noble family in Central Java, he exhibited a high degree of nationalism from a young age. During the Indonesian National Revolution from 1945 to 1949 he saw active service as a member of the Student Army, working reconnaissance. Despite wanting to remain in the military, under influence by his father he continued his education, eventually enrolling in the faculty of literature at the University of Indonesia.
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Walter Muir Whitehill
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Walter Muir Whitehill was an American writer, historian, medievalist, preservationist, and the Director and Librarian of the Boston Athenaeum from 1946 to 1973. He was also editor for publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts from 1946 to 1978. From 1951 to 1972, Whitehill was a professor at Harvard University.
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Archibald Cary Coolidge
1866 - 1928 (62 years)
Archibald Cary Coolidge was an American educator and diplomat. He was a professor of history at Harvard College from 1908 and the first director of the Harvard University Library from 1910 until his death. Coolidge was also a scholar in international affairs, a planner of the Widener Library, a member of the United States Foreign Service, and editor-in-chief of the policy journal Foreign Affairs.
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Dorothy Stimson
1890 - 1988 (98 years)
Dorothy Stimson was an American academic. She served as the dean of Goucher College from 1921 to 1947 and was a professor of history at the college until 1955. Stimson served as the president of the History of Science Society between 1953 and 1957. Her research included the reception of the Copernican theory. She also edited a collection of papers by George Sarton, considered to be the founder of the discipline of the history of science.
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Patrick Weston Joyce
1827 - 1914 (87 years)
Patrick Weston "P. W." Joyce was an Irish historian, writer and music collector, known particularly for his research in Irish etymology and local place names of Ireland. Biography He was born in Ballyorgan in the Ballyhoura Mountains, on the borders of counties Limerick and Cork in Ireland, and grew up in nearby Glenosheen. The family claimed descent from one Seán Mór Seoighe , a stonemason from Connemara, County Galway.
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Herbert Grundmann
1902 - 1970 (68 years)
Herbert Grundmann was a German historian, soldier and professor who was the editorial director of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Education Grundmann was born in 1902 in Meerane, Saxony, and grew up in Chemnitz, Saxony. After graduating from high school in 1921, he enrolled in the University of Leipzig. He first majored in political economy, thinking he would take over his father's factory. After several exchange semesters at Heidelberg and Munich, he decided to specialize in medieval history. He wrote his dissertation under Walter Goetz in Leipzig, the topic being Joachim of Fiore. Grun...
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Konstantin Nevolin
1806 - 1855 (49 years)
Konstantin Alekseevich Nevolin was a Russian legal historian. Academic career He started his academic career as a professor of law in Berlin in 1829. In 1834 he returned to Kiev after he was appointed rector of the newly founded University of Kiev. Later he also served as a professor of law at Saint Petersburg State University from 1843.
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Douglas Hyde
1860 - 1949 (89 years)
Douglas Ross Hyde , known as , was an Irish academic, linguist, scholar of the Irish language, politician and diplomat who served as the first President of Ireland from June 1938 to June 1945. He was a leading figure in the Gaelic revival, and the first President of the Gaelic League, one of the most influential cultural organisations in Ireland at the time.
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Wilbur Henry Siebert
1866 - 1961 (95 years)
Wilbur Henry Siebert was an educator and historian from the United States. Biography Wilbur Henry Siebert was born in Columbus, Ohio on August 30, 1866. His father had emigrated from Frankfurt, Germany in 1832. The son graduated from Ohio State University in 1888, from Harvard in 1889 and received his A.M. at Harvard in 1890. He studied in Germany from 1890 to 1891.
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Samuel Daniel
1562 - 1619 (57 years)
Samuel Daniel was an English poet, playwright and historian in the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean eras. He was an innovator in a wide range of literary genres. His best-known works are the sonnet cycle Delia, the epic poem The Civil Wars Between the Houses of Lancaster and York, the dialogue in verse Musophilus, and the essay on English poetry A Defense of Rhyme. He was considered one of the preeminent authors of his time and his works had a significant influence on contemporary writers, including William Shakespeare. Daniel's writings continued to influence authors for centuries after his death, especially the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.
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Otto Liiv
1905 - 1942 (37 years)
Otto Liiv was an Estonian historian and archivist. He was one of the founders of Estonian archival science as well as one of the most prolific and respected historians in Estonia. Liiv attended school in Narva and Tallinn and enrolled at the University of Tartu in 1923 and graduated in 1927. He was the head of the Estonian State Central Archives from 1929 to 1942. He also lectured at the University of Tartu and was the chief editor of the journal "Ajalooline Ajakiri". Liiv had an academic interest in the history of the 17th century Estonia and contributed to the books "The Economic History of...
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Max Farrand
1869 - 1945 (76 years)
Max Farrand was an American historian who taught at several universities and was the first director of the Huntington Library. Early life He was born in Newark, New Jersey, United States. He graduated from Princeton .
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Austin Lane Poole
1889 - 1963 (74 years)
Austin Lane Poole, FBA was a British mediaevalist. Poole came from an academic lineage, being the son of Reginald Lane Poole , the nephew of Stanley Lane Poole , and the great-nephew of Reginald Stuart Poole .
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John Andrew Boyle
1916 - 1978 (62 years)
John Andrew Boyle , was a British orientalist and historian. Life and career He was born at Worcester Park, Surrey, England, on 10 March 1916. He graduated with first class honours in German at Birmingham University. He later pursued the studies of Oriental languages at the universities of Berlin and Göttingen.
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Peter Elmsley
1773 - 1825 (52 years)
Peter Elmsley was an English classical scholar. Early life and education Peter Elmsley was the younger son of Alexander Elmsley of St Clement Danes, Westminster, who had Scottish ancestry. He was educated at Westminster School and then at Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated as a BA in 1794, later being promoted to a Master of Arts in 1797, and receiving the degrees of BD on 30 October 1823 and DD on 7 November 1823. He inherited a fortune in 1802 from his uncle, also named Peter Elmsley, a well-known bookseller in the Strand, and devoted himself to the study of classical authors and m...
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Myles Dillon
1900 - 1972 (72 years)
Myles Patrick Dillon was an Irish scholar whose primary interests were comparative philology, Celtic studies, and Sanskrit. Life Myles Dillon was born in Dublin; he was one of six children of John Dillon and his wife Elizabeth Mathew; James Dillon, the leader of Fine Gael, was his younger brother.
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Sergei Tokarev
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Sergei Aleksandrovich Tokarev was a Russian scholar, ethnographer, historian, researcher of religious beliefs, doctor of historical sciences, and professor at Moscow State University. Birth and education Sergei Aleksandrovich Tokarev was born in Tula on 29 December 1899. He graduated with honors from Tula grammar school and entered Moscow University. Immediately after the revolution, conditions in Moscow in 1918 were dangerous and difficult, and Tokarev went back to the apparent safety of his home province of Tula. He taught Russian and Latin in local schools for four years. Tokarev returned to Moscow University in 1922, where he began social and historical studies.
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Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney
1757 - 1820 (63 years)
Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney was a French philosopher, abolitionist, writer, orientalist, and politician. He was at first surnamed Boisgirais after his father's estate, but afterwards assumed the name of Volney .
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Felix Stähelin
1873 - 1952 (79 years)
Felix Stähelin was a Swiss historian of Basel. He studied ancient history and classical philology in Basel, Bonn and Berlin, completing a doctorate on the Galatians in 1897. He worked as a school teacher from 1902–1907, and as a lecturer at Basel from 1907, receiving tenure as professor of Ancient History in 1931, retiring in 1937.
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James Anthony Froude
1818 - 1894 (76 years)
James Anthony Froude was an English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine. From his upbringing amidst the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, Froude intended to become a clergyman, but doubts about the doctrines of the Anglican church, published in his scandalous 1849 novel The Nemesis of Faith, drove him to abandon his religious career. Froude turned to writing history, becoming one of the best-known historians of his time for his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.
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Pyotr Karyshkovsky
1921 - 1988 (67 years)
Petro Karyshkovsky-Ikar - Ukrainian Soviet historian, numismatist, a scholar and lexicographer. Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor, since 1963 and until his last days he headed the department of ancient history and medieval Odesa University.
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John Sherren Brewer
1810 - 1879 (69 years)
John Sherren Brewer, Jr. was an English clergyman, historian and scholar. He was a brother of E. Cobham Brewer, compiler of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. Birth and education Brewer was born in Norwich, the son of a Baptist schoolmaster. He matriculated at Queen's College, Oxford in 1827, graduating B.A. in 1833, M.A. 1835. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1837, and became chaplain to a central London workhouse. In 1839 he was appointed lecturer in classical literature at King's College London, and in 1858 he became professor of English language and literature and lecturer in modern history, succeeding FD Maurice.
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James MacCaffrey
1875 - 1935 (60 years)
Monsignor James MacCaffrey STL, PhD was an Irish priest, theologian and historian. Biography Monsignor MacCaffrey was born in 1875, at Fivemiletown, Co. Tyrone, he was the son of Francis MacCaffrey of Alderwood, Clogher, Co. Tyrone. He was educated at St. Macartan's Seminary, Monaghan, before going to St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, and was ordained there in 1899.
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Ross J. S. Hoffman
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Ross John Swartz Hoffman was an American historian, writer, educator, and conservative intellectual who specialized in Modern European History and International Affairs. Life and career Born on February 2, 1902, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Hoffman attended Lafayette College and the University of Pennsylvania . His doctoral dissertation , prepared under the supervision of William Ezra Lingelbach, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1933 and received the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association in 1934.
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Ephraim Emerton
1851 - 1935 (84 years)
Ephraim Emerton was an American educator, author, translator, and historian prominent in his field of European medieval history. Early life and education Ephraim Emerton was born in Salem, Massachusetts, to James and Martha West Emerton. His elder brother was James Henry Emerton , naturalist and arachnologist.
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Adolf Holm
1830 - 1900 (70 years)
Adolf Holm was a German historian of antiquity. Biography Adolf Holm was the son of a producer and distributor of tobacco in Lübeck and was born in a house located between Braunstraße and Holstenstraße by the Trave. He studied at Leipzig and Berlin and obtained a doctorate in 1851. Immediately thereafter he was employed by the Katharineum, a grammar school in Lübeck founded in 1531 for the study of ancient languages. He worked on history and geography of ancient Sicily and Greece and wrote a work in several volumes on the History of Sicily in ancient times. At Lübeck he held several conferenc...
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Douglass Adair
1912 - 1968 (56 years)
Douglass Greybill Adair was an American historian who specialized in intellectual history. He is best known for his work in researching the authorship of disputed numbers of The Federalist Papers, and his influential studies in the history and influence of republicanism in the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the era of the Enlightenment. His most famous essay, "Fame and the Founding Fathers," introduced the pursuit of fame as a new motivation for understanding the actions for the Framers.
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Clemens Baeumker
1853 - 1924 (71 years)
Clemens Baeumker was a German historian of philosophy. Baeumker was born in Paderborn to a gymnasium teacher. He studied philosophy, theology, and philology in Paderborn and later at the University of Münster, from which he obtained a doctorate in 1877. From 1879 he was a gymnasium lecturer in Münster.
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Degory Wheare
1573 - 1647 (74 years)
Degory Wheare, also spelt Digory Whear was an historian, the first Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford. Life He was born in Jacobstow, Cornwall, at the mansion of Berry Court. He matriculated at Broadgates Hall, Oxford, on 6 July 1593, graduated B.A. on 5 February 1597, and proceeded M.A. on 16 June 1600. He was a contemporary of Francis Rous, a lifelong friend; and he was tutor at Broadgates Hall to John Pym . Another Oxford friend was Charles Fitzgeoffrey.
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Matvei Lyubavsky
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Matvey Kuzmich Lyubavsky was a Russian and Soviet historian, professor, academic and rector of the Moscow University from 1911 to 1917. Biography Lyubavsky was born in to the family of a village deacon. He lost his left eye in an accident during childhood. Lyubavsky graduated from the faculty of History of the Imperial Moscow University in 1882 and received his doctorate in 1901 and became a professor at the Moscow University.
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Carl Brinkmann
1885 - 1954 (69 years)
Carl Brinkmann was a German sociologist and economist, focusing on socioeconomics and the history of political economy. Brinkmann was born in Tilsit, East Prussia, now in Kaliningrad, and died in Oberstdorf, Allgäu. In 1904 he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at The Queen's College, Oxford. He taught as a professor at the Heidelberg University , Berlin University , and Tübingen University .
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Lucy Maynard Salmon
1853 - 1927 (74 years)
Lucy Maynard Salmon was an American historian. She was a professor of history at Vassar College from 1889 until her death. She was the first woman to be a member of the executive committee of the American Historical Association. She published widely in historical journals and general magazines, and was highly active in civic affairs, supporting civil service reform and world and women suffrage.
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Tommaso Fazello
1498 - 1570 (72 years)
Tommaso Fazello was an Italian Dominican friar, historian and antiquarian. He is known as the father of Sicilian history. He is the author of the first printed history of Sicily: De Rebus Siculis Decades Duae, published in Palermo in 1558 in Latin. He was born in Sciacca, Sicily and died in Palermo, Sicily.
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Norman Davis
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
Norman Davis was a New Zealand-born professor of English language and literature at the University of Oxford. Early life and career Davis was born in 1913 at Dunedin, New Zealand. He received his education at Otago Boys' High School and the University of Otago, where he was taught by Professor Herbert Ramsay. He was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1934 and studied comparative philology. From 1937 to 1938, he lectured in English at the University of Kaunas in Lithuania, and then at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, 1938–39.
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Fred Albert Shannon
1893 - 1963 (70 years)
Fred Albert Shannon was an American historian. He had many publications related to American history, and he won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861-1865 .
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Georges Haupt
1928 - 1978 (50 years)
Georges Haupt, also known as George or Gheorghe Haupt , was Romanian and French a historian of socialism, politically active in the Romanian Communist Party and the French Section of the Workers' International.
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Alexander Soloviev
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Alexander Vasilievich Soloviev was a Russian émigré jurist, slavist, and historian of Serbia and Serbian law. His academic activity included research on the Bogumils, Serbian heraldry, philately and archeology, and he also published translations from Russian and French into Serbian. Having fled from Russia not long after the October Revolution, he settled in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where he became a professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law . After the end of World War II he briefly served as the first dean of the Sarajevo Law School , before Communist repressi...
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