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.
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List of the most influential people in History,
#7251
Orin Grant Libby
1864 - 1952 (88 years)
Orin Grant Libby was an American historian. Biography Libby was the son of farmer Asa Libby and his wife Julia Libby. As well as farming, his father held several local government positions, and worked in several skilled crafts. In 1886, Libby received a diploma from River Falls State Normal School, and then taught in high schools until 1890, when he entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a junior. He received a bachelor's degree from Wisconsin in 1892, and stayed to continue his studies in history. In 1893, he submitted a master's thesis with an emphasis on economic history entitled “De Witt Clinton and the Erie Canal — A State Enterprise.” He ultimately received a Ph.D.
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Paul Hazard
1878 - 1944 (66 years)
Paul Gustave Marie Camille Hazard , was a French professor and historian of ideas. Biography Hazard was the son of a school teacher. Starting in 1900, he attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1910 and became famous for his Ph.D. dissertation La Révolution française et les lettres italiennes .
Go to Profile#7253
Wilhelm Arndt
1838 - 1895 (57 years)
Wilhelm Ferdinand Arndt was a German historian. Biography He graduated from the University of Göttingen and became connected with the University of Leipzig . Works For many years he was a collaborator on the Monumenta Germaniæ Historica .
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Maria Luisa Righini-Bonelli
1917 - 1981 (64 years)
Maria Luisa Righini-Bonelli was an Italian science historian and educator. The daughter of General Luigi Bonelli and Adele Giamperoli, she was born Maria Luisa Bonelli in Pesaro. She studied Spanish language and literature and then taught in the faculty of political science at the University of Florence from 1948 to 1968. She worked with at the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza beginning in 1942. In 1961, she became director of the institute after Corsini died. Righini-Bonelli saved most of the important treasures of the institute during the Flood of Florence in 1966. She was a profes...
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Hendrick Peter Godfried Quack
1834 - 1917 (83 years)
Hendrick Peter Godfried Quack was a Dutch legal scholar, economist and historian, who is best known for his work De socialisten: Personen en stelsels . Biography Quack, born in Zetten to a beer brewer and his wife, commenced studies at Utrecht in 1853, followed by law studies at the Amsterdam Athenaeum Illustre. In Amsterdam, he attended lectures by Jeronimo de Bosch Kemper and Martinus des Amorie van der Hoeven, both Christian critics of liberalism. Following the example of his professors, Quack became convinced that liberalism could not address the social problems of his day. He submitted a...
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Aleksije Jelačić
1892 - 1941 (49 years)
Aleksije Jelačić was a Serbian historian. Jelačić was born in Kiev to a family of South Slavic descent; reportedly his ancestors moved to Russia in the 18th century from the Habsburg Empire. His ancestors came from Croatia.
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William Wells Newell
1839 - 1907 (68 years)
William Wells Newell was an American folklorist, school teacher, minister and philosophy professor. Biography Newell was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School. After trying his hand at ministry, he was a faculty member at the new philosophy department at Harvard University for a few years. However, the bulk of Newell's career was as a school teacher. He taught at the Wells Schoolfounded by his grandfather, William Wellssituated on Elmwood Avenue. Newell founded the American Folklore Society in 1888 where he edited the Journal of American Folklore.
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Joseph Spence
1699 - 1768 (69 years)
Joseph Spence was a historian, literary scholar and anecdotist, most famous for his collection of anecdotes that are an invaluable resource for historians of 18th-century English literature . Early life Spence was born on 28 April 1699, at Kingsclere, Hampshire, the son of Joseph and Mirabella .
Go to Profile#7259
Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani
1896 - 1956 (60 years)
Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani was an Iranian literary scholar, historian, translator, and man of letters. Eqbal Ashtiani was born in Ashtian. He was educated at Dar ul-Funun in Tehran and University of Paris. In 1944 Eqbal founded the monthly periodical Yādgār. Eqbal Ashtiani died in Rome, Italy and was buried at the Shah-Abdol-Azim shrine in Rey, Iran.
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Beryl Smalley
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Beryl Smalley was an English historian best known for her work The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, originally published in 1941, but revised many times, a book that laid the foundations of modern study of the medieval popular Bible.
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Johann Daniel Ritter
1709 - 1775 (66 years)
Johann Daniel Ritter was a German historian. In 1732 he received his magister degree from the University of Leipzig, where in 1735 he became an associate professor of philosophy. In 1742 he was appointed professor of history at the University of Wittenberg.
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Menassa Youhanna
1899 - 1930 (31 years)
Father Menassa Youhanna was a Coptic priest, historian and theologian, most noted for his work on the history of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. Biography He was born in August, 1899 in Mallawi in Upper Egypt and died on Friday May 16, 1930, at the age of 30. Born in a Coptic Orthodox family, his father was also a priest.
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Antonio Schinella Conti
1677 - 1749 (72 years)
Antonio Schinella Conti , also known by his religious title as Abate Conti, was an Italian writer, translator, mathematician, philosopher and physicist. He was born in Padua on 22 January 1677 and died there on 6 April 1749.
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Henry Sheldon
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Henry Davidson Sheldon was an American educator and historian. Sheldon was born while his parents were en route to Oregon from the New York area. He was educated at the University of the Pacific and Stanford University. He continued his education at Clark University, where he received a doctorate in education.
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Emanuel Rostworowski
1923 - 1989 (66 years)
Emanuel Mateusz Rostworowski was a Polish historian, professor at Kraków's Jagiellonian University, and member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He specialized in 18th-century history. In 1965-89 he was editor-in-chief of Polski Słownik Biograficzny.
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Albert Houtin
1867 - 1926 (59 years)
Albert Houtin was a French Catholic theologian and historian with a focus on the history of doctrine and on modernism in French religion. Born in La Flèche, he grew up to become a priest and was ordained in 1891. Following the turn of the century, he became disenchanted with religion and came to regard all religious belief systems as fraudulent. In 1907, he had attended the Fourth International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston, which had been organised by Unitarians.
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Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko
1884 - 1973 (89 years)
Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko was one of the foremost Ukrainian historians of the 20th century. She was a wife of the Ukrainian academician of history and statesman Mykola Vasylenko. Life and career Polonska-Vasylenko belonged to Russian nobility; her father was a Russian Imperial officer Dmytro Menshov . Polonska-Vasylenko studied history under Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky at Kyiv University and from 1912 was a member of the Kyiv-based Historical Society of Nestor the Chronicler. From 1916, she was a lecturer at Kyiv University and Director of its archeological museum. During the 1920s, the most l...
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James Bass Mullinger
1834 - 1917 (83 years)
James Bass Mullinger , sometimes known by his pen name Theodorus, was a British author, historian, lecturer and scholar. A longtime university librarian and lecturer at St. John's College, Cambridge, Mullinger was the author of several books detailing the college's history and similar academic subjects. He was also a contributor to many periodicals of the Victorian era, most especially, Cambridge History of Modern Literature, the Dictionary of National Biography and Encyclopædia Britannica.
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José Antonio Maravall
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
José Antonio Maravall Casesnoves was a Spanish historian and essayist associated with the Generation of '36 movement. Biography Maravall studied philosophy and law at the University of Murcia, where he completed his final degree in political science and economics at the Central University, where he was a student of Jose Ortega y Gasset. He became a university professor in Spain and abroad. Maravall was head of the department at the University of La Laguna and the Complutense University of Madrid. He also became a member of the Real Academia de la Historia and the president of the Spanish A...
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Eduard Winkelmann
1838 - 1896 (58 years)
Eduard Winkelmann was a German historian. Biography He was born at Danzig in the Province of Prussia. He studied at the universities of Berlin and Göttingen, worked at the Monumenta Germaniae historica, and in 1869 became professor of history at the University of Bern, and four years later at Heidelberg. He also spent some time in the Russian Empire, where he was headmaster at the knight and chapter school in Reval beginning in 1860, and was later appointed professor at the University of Dorpat . He died at Heidelberg.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany
1807 - 1876 (69 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany was a German Lutheran theologian, historian, librarian and publicist. His rationalist outlook, influenced by Georg Friedrich Daumer, forced him to retire from his post as vicar at St. Aegidius parish in Nuremberg. He became city librarian in Nuremberg in 1841. His early publications are pamphlets against Lutheran bigotry, specifically agitating against the Old Lutheran president of the Lutheran assembly in Munich, Friedrich von Roth. In 1855, Ghillany moved to Munich, but he did not succeed in finding employment as a civil servant or diplomat, and he went on to publish multi-volume works on European history.
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Johann Georg Graevius
1632 - 1703 (71 years)
Johann Georg Graevius was a German classical scholar and critic. He was born in Naumburg, in the Electorate of Saxony. Life Graevius was originally intended for the law, but made the acquaintance of Johann Friedrich Gronovius during a casual visit to Deventer, under whose influence he abandoned jurisprudence for philology. He completed his studies under Daniel Heinsius at Leiden, and among others under the Protestant theologian David Blondel at Amsterdam.
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Tadeusz Sulimirski
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Tadeusz Joseph Sulimirski was a Polish-born British historian and archaeologist, who emigrated to the United Kingdom soon after the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Sulimirski was a pioneer and leading expert in the study of the archaeology of steppe nomads, particularly the Cimmerians, Scythians and Sarmatians.
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Karl Theodor von Heigel
1842 - 1915 (73 years)
Karl Theodor von Heigel was a German historian. He was the brother of novelist Karl August von Heigel. He studied history at the University of Munich, obtaining his habilitation for history in 1873. In 1879 he became an associate professor, and several years later, a full professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Munich. In 1885 he was appointed professor and director of the historical seminary at the university.
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Louise Nalbandian
1926 - 1974 (48 years)
Louise Ziazan Nalbandian was an American Armenian historian and professor in the History Department at California State University, Fresno from 1964 to 1974. She was the author of The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties Through the Nineteenth Century.
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Dušan Pirjevec
1921 - 1977 (56 years)
Dušan Pirjevec, known by his nom de guerre Ahac , was a Slovenian Partisan, literary historian and philosopher. He was one of the most influential public intellectuals in post–World War II Slovenia.
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Pierre Huard
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Pierre Huard was a French physician , historian of medicine and anthropologist, long in post in Indochina, dean of several faculties of medicine , rector of the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a pioneer in the history of medicine.
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Axel Olrik
1864 - 1917 (53 years)
Axel Olrik was a Danish folklorist and scholar of mediaeval historiography, and a pioneer in the methodical study of oral narrative. Olrik was born in Frederiksberg, the son of the artist Henrik Olrik. Artist Dagmar Olrik, judge Eyvind Olrik, historian Hans Olrik and cultural historian Jørgen Olrik were siblings of his.
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Otto Lauffer
1874 - 1949 (75 years)
Otto Lauffer was a German folklorist and cultural historian. Life Otto Lauffer was born in Weende on 20 February 1874 and spent his childhood there, until 1886. He studied German language and literature studies, history and art history in Göttingen , Berlin, Munich and again in Göttingen . In 1896 he was awarded his doctorate under the supervision of Moritz Heyne.
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Marcel Poëte
1866 - 1950 (84 years)
Marcel César Poëte was a French librarian, historian and urban planning theoretician. He was a co-founder of the School of Advanced Urban Studies, where he taught, and was highly influential in developing new theories of urban planning in Paris in the first half of the 20th century.
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Auguste Audollent
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Auguste Audollent was a French historian, archaeologist and Latin epigrapher, specialist of ancient Rome, in particular the magical inscriptions . His main thesis was devoted to Roman Carthage. He was elected a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1932.
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Adam Shortt
1859 - 1931 (72 years)
Adam Shortt was an economic historian in Ontario. He was the first full-time employed academic in the field at a Canadian university . Biography Shortt was born in Kilworth, Canada West, on 24 November 1859 to George Shortt and Mary Shields. At the age of twenty he attended Queen's University with the intention of becoming a Presbyterian minister. When he graduated in 1883 however, he pursued graduate studies in philosophy, chemistry and botany.
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Josef Kalousek
1838 - 1915 (77 years)
Josef Kalousek , was a Czech historian and professor of Czech history at Univerzita Karlova in Prague. Life Josef Kalousek was born in a poor farmer family in Vamberk. Work Bibliography in Czech České státní právo Nástin životopisu Františka Palackého Karel IV., Otec vlasti Děje Královské České společnosti nauk Tři historické mapy k dějinám českým Výklad k historické mapě Čech O vůdčích myšlenkách v historickém díle Františka Palackého Obrana knížete Václava Svatého proti smyšlenkám a křivým úsudkům o jeho povaze O potřebě prohloubiti vědomosti o Husovi a jeho době
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Joseph Fletcher
1934 - 1984 (50 years)
Joseph F. Fletcher, Jr., usually referred to as Joseph Fletcher , was an American historian of China and Central Asia and a professor in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department of Harvard University. His main areas of research included interaction between the Islamic and Chinese worlds, Manchu and Mongol studies.
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Abu Hafs Umar al-Nasafi
1067 - 1142 (75 years)
Najm ad-Dīn Abū Ḥafṣ 'Umar ibn Muḥammad an-Nasafī was a Muslim jurist, theologian, mufassir, muhaddith and historian. A Persian scholar born in present-day Uzbekistan, he wrote mostly in Arabic.
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Ernst Steindorff
1839 - 1895 (56 years)
Ernst Steindorff was a German historian who was a native of Flensburg. He studied history at the Universities of Kiel, Göttingen and Berlin. From 1873 he was an associate professor of history at Göttingen, where in 1883 he became a full professor.
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Francesco Bonaini
1806 - 1874 (68 years)
Francesco Bonaini was a philologist, paleographer and Italian archivist. Biography Bonaini was born into a Catholic family with Jewish heritage. Bonaini's father, Domenico, was the son of a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, and committed suicide due to a mental illness before Francesco embarked on his ecclesiastical career.
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John Francis Bannon
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
John Francis Bannon was a Jesuit and a historian of the American West, especially of matters related to the Spanish borderlands. Bannon received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Saint Louis University. He then completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. Bannon was a professor at Saint Louis University for several years. Bannon's work The Spanish Borderland Frontier, 1513-1821, published in 1970, is the seminal work on the subject.
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Ferdinand II of León
1137 - 1188 (51 years)
Ferdinand II , was a member of the Castilian cadet branch of the House of Ivrea and King of León and Galicia from 1157 until his death. Life Family Born in Toledo, Castile, Ferdinand was the third but second surviving son of King Alfonso VII of León and Castile and Berenguela of Barcelona. His paternal grandparents were Count Raymond of Burgundy and Queen Urraca of León and his maternal grandparents were Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona, and Douce I, Countess of Provence. He had seven full-siblings, of whom only three survived infancy: the later King Sancho III of Castile, Constance a...
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Miloš Mladenović
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Miloš Mladenović was professor emeritus of History at McGill University in Montreal, and an expert on Cold War politics. Biography Miloš Mladenović was born in Valjevo, Serbia, in 1903. He studied at the University of Belgrade's Law School between 1922 and 1926, and graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce and Law. At that time he seemed to be destined for a long, diplomatic career, however, World War II intervened. After World War II, Miloš Mladenović settled temporarily in Western Europe. Unwilling to return to Yugoslavia under a Communist regime, Mladenović chose to settle in Canada permanently.
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René Fülöp-Miller
1891 - 1963 (72 years)
René Fülöp-Miller, born Philip René Maria Müller was an Austrian cultural historian and writer. He was born to an Alsatian immigrant and a Serbian mother in Karánsebes, Austria-Hungary and died in Hanover, New Hampshire.
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Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching
1783 - 1829 (46 years)
Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching was a German antiquary. His knowledge of subjects pertaining to Germany in the Middle Ages was notable. Biography He was born in Berlin, the son of Anton Friedrich Büsching, a geographer and educator. He studied at the universities of Erlangen and Halle, was appointed royal archivist at Breslau in 1811, and in 1817 an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Breslau. He collected oral folk stories from the Uckermark region, which he published in Volks-Sagen, Märchen und Legenden .
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Platon Zhukovich
1857 - 1919 (62 years)
Platon Zhukovich was an Imperial Russian historian and theologian. Biography Born to a family of Russian Orthodox church official , in 1881 he graduated from the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy. He worked as a teacher at the Polotsk Theological School before moving to Vilna where he taught history of the Orthodox church at the local theological school.
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Arthur John Butler
1844 - 1910 (66 years)
Arthur John Butler , was an English scholar, editor, and mountaineer, professor of Italian language and literature at University College London. Apart from his work on Dante and other Italian poets, Butler translated books from German and French, including the memoirs of Bismarck, Thiébault, and Marbot, and work by Sainte-Beuve. He also contributed to the Cambridge Modern History and the Dictionary of National Biography and in the 1890s was editor of the Alpine Journal.
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Hans Gram
1685 - 1748 (63 years)
Hans Gram was a Danish academic, philologist and historian. Biography Gram was born at Bjergby in Hjørring on North Jutlandic Island, Denmark. His father was a parish priest. In 1703, he graduated from the University of Copenhagen. In 1708 he acquired a Master's Degree. In 1714 he became a professor of Greek at the University of Copenhagen. In 1730 he was named royal historian and royal librarian as well as manager of the Royal Library and the secretary of the Royal Archives. From 1740, he returned to the University of Copenhagen where he served as rector from 1744-1745.
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Wilhelm Ihne
1821 - 1902 (81 years)
Joseph Anton Friedrich Wilhelm Ihne was a German historian who was a native of Fürth. He was the father of architect Ernst von Ihne . Life He studied philology at Bonn, obtaining his degree in 1843 with a thesis titled Quaestiones Terentianae. From 1847 to 1849 he was a teacher in Elberfeld, afterwards moving to England, where he taught school in Liverpool until 1863. He returned to Germany as a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg, where in 1873 he was appointed professor. He died in Heidelberg.
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Heinrich Schurtz
1863 - 1903 (40 years)
Heinrich Schurtz was a German ethnologist and historian. His most significant work is said to be Altersklassen und Männerbünde which emphasized the role gender and generational issues have in social institutions and argued that basing the society on the family was a step backwards. His notion of Männerbünde placed male associations, where he deemed masculinity more "unfettered", in opposition to the family which he saw as dominated by women. Notions of Männerbünde, though not just Schurtz's, would have an influence on Nazi Germany's SS while in a very different way his ideas on same-sex bond...
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Augustin Bunea
1857 - 1909 (52 years)
Augustin Bunea was an Austro-Hungarian ethnic Romanian historian and priest within the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church. Biography Origins and role in Blaj Bunea was born in Vad, a village in the Țara Făgărașului region of Transylvania, then part of the Austrian Empire. He attended primary school from 1864 to 1870, there and in nearby Ohaba. He went to a gymnasium in Brașov until the spring of 1877, when he was briefly transferred to Blaj. While in Brașov, he and classmate Andrei Bârseanu edited a magazine by hand; it was called Conversațiuni. Jurnal literar. In the magazine, Bunea published 9...
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Abraham Polak
1910 - 1970 (60 years)
Abraham Nahum Polak was an Israeli historian, a professor at the Tel Aviv University since its inception, professor of medieval history and founder of the department of Middle-Eastern History. His main areas of research were Jewish history, Arab history, nations of Islam and Africa and the history of the Khazars.
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Gustav Schnürer
1860 - 1941 (81 years)
Gustav Schnürer was a German-Swiss historian. Biography Gustav Schnürer was born in the Silesian village of Jätzdorf on 30 June 1860. He studied history, geography and philology at the universities of Berlin, Breslau and Münster, earning his doctorate in 1883 at Münster. Afterwards, he worked as an editorial assistant at Munich, later obtaining a professorship in medieval history at the University of Fribourg .
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