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,
#7701
Newman Ivey White
1892 - 1948 (56 years)
Newman Ivey White was an American professor of English at Duke University. He was born in Statesville, North Carolina, United States. He was a noted Shelley scholar, as well as a collector of American folklore, including folk songs and Duke limericks. He served as Professor of English at Trinity College and Duke University from 1919 to 1948. He wrote American Negro Folk Songs and in it he quoted a work song, sung by laborers in Augusta, Georgia, which mentioned the notorious Judge Fogarty. White also recalled hearing a version in Statesville, North Carolina in 1903.
Go to Profile#7702
Andrew J. Newman
1900 - Present (126 years)
Andrew J. Newman holds the chair of Islamic Studies and Persian at the University of Edinburgh. Education and career Newman majored in history at Dartmouth College, graduating summa cum laude. He went to the University of California, Los Angeles for graduate study in Islamic studies, and earned his Ph.D. there. After postdoctoral research at Green Templeton College, Oxford, affiliated with Oxford's Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, he joined the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1996.
Go to Profile#7703
Heinrich Wieleitner
1874 - 1931 (57 years)
Heinrich Wieleitner was a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He became an honorary professor of mathematics at the University of Munich but for much of his career worked in school- and college-level education.
Go to Profile#7704
George Hubbard Blakeslee
1871 - 1954 (83 years)
George Hubbard Blakeslee was an academic, professor of history and international relations at Clark University, and a founder of the Journal of Race Development, the first American journal devoted to international relations. This journal was later renamed the Journal of International Relations, which in turn was merged with Foreign Affairs.
Go to Profile#7705
Harold J. Grimm
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Harold J. Grimm was an academic, historian, and writer and an expert on the Reformation. Born in Saginaw in Michigan in 1901, Grimm gained his PhD at Ohio State University. Grimm's numerous posts as an educator included Professor of History at Capital University, the Ohio State University, and Indiana University. He was department chairman at Ohio State and Indiana universities. In 1978, Grimm received the Distinguished Teacher award at Ohio State University. He was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow at the University of Freiburg.
Go to Profile#7706
Jaime Eyzaguirre
1908 - 1968 (60 years)
Jaime Eyzaguirre was a Chilean lawyer, essayist and historian. He is variously recognized as a writer of Spanish traditionalist or conservative historiography in his country. Early life and marriage Eyzaguirre was born into a religious upper-class family in Santiago. As young man he studied law in the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and was member of the Catholic student organization Asociación Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos. During his studies he was influenced by the Jesuit Fernando Vives and the writings of Manuel Lacunza.
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Joseph Rayback
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Joseph G. Rayback was a professor of history in the United States. Career He served in the United States Navy and earned a Ph.D. in American history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. For many years, he was a professor of history and chair of the department at Pennsylvania State University. He was faculty advisor to Phi Alpha Theta, the honorary in history and with Donald B. Hoffmann helped to organize the society on a national basis. He served on the editorial board of the journal, The Historian, published by Phi Alpha Theta. Following service at Penn State, Rayback taught American history at the University of Saskatchewan in western Canada.
Go to Profile#7708
Ola Elizabeth Winslow
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
Ola Elizabeth Winslow was an American historian, biographer, and educator. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for her biography of Jonathan Edwards, an 18th-century American theologian whose basic writings she edited for Signet Classics.
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Heinz Heimsoeth
1886 - 1975 (89 years)
Heinz Heimsoeth was a German historian of philosophy. Biography He was born in Cologne. Heimsoeth began his studies at Heidelberg in 1905, but soon transferred to Berlin, where he studied with Wilhelm Dilthey, Alois Riehl, and Ernst Cassirer. Due to his interest in Kant he transferred in 1907 to Marburg, where he studied with Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. He graduated in 1911 with a thesis on Descartes. After a year studying in Paris with Henri Bergson he was habilitated with a thesis on Leibniz.
Go to Profile#7710
Malcolm Caldwell
1931 - 1978 (47 years)
James Alexander Malcolm Caldwell was a Scottish academic and a prolific Marxist writer. He was a consistent critic of American foreign policy, a campaigner for Asian communist and socialist movements and a supporter of the Khmer Rouge. Caldwell was murdered under mysterious circumstances a few hours after meeting Pol Pot in Cambodia.
Go to Profile#7711
Lilian Knowles
1870 - 1926 (56 years)
Lilian Charlotte Anne Knowles was a British historian and Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics in the 1920s. She was the first female Dean of the Economic History Faculty in the University of London.
Go to Profile#7712
Walter S. Huxford
1892 - 1958 (66 years)
Walter Scott Huxford was an American professor of physics at Northwestern University and was a co-inventor of the sunburnometer. Education His education included a bachelor's degree at Doane College, a master's degree at the University of Nebraska, and a PhD degree at the University of Michigan in 1928, with a thesis entitled: Determination of the Charge of Positive Thermions form Measurements of the Shot Effect.
Go to Profile#7713
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
1877 - 1934 (57 years)
#7714
Preserved Smith
1880 - 1941 (61 years)
Preserved Smith was an American historian of the Protestant Reformation. He was the son of Henry Preserved Smith, a scholar of the Old Testament, and inherited his name from a line of Puritan ancestors stretching back to the 17th century. He attended Amherst College and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1907, and continued studies at the Sorbonne and the University of Berlin. Like his mentor James Harvey Robinson at Columbia, he had a high respect for science and a belief that knowledge of history was a way to improve human prospects for the future. He taught at Cornell University as a member of the Department of History from 1923 to 1941.
Go to Profile#7715
Hugh Talmage Lefler
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Hugh Talmage Lefler was a historian known for his work on the history of North Carolina. He was born in Cooleemee, North Carolina, and grew up on a farm in Davie County. He taught at the University of North Carolina for many years and authored a number of books. His book The Growth of North Carolina was used as the standard state history textbook in North Carolina public schools. His book North Carolina, History of a Southern State was the leading text on the subject. Author Sam Ragan, writing in the North Carolina Historical Review, wrote that Lefler "made history come alive in the classroom...
Go to Profile#7716
Henri Grégoire
1881 - 1964 (83 years)
Henri Grégoire was an eminent scholar of the Byzantine Empire, virtually the founder of Byzantine studies in Belgium. Grégoire spent most of his teaching career at the Université libre de Bruxelles. In 1938, he taught at the New School for Social Research and during the Second World War, joined the École libre des hautes études at the New School.
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Eduard Castle
1875 - 1959 (84 years)
Eduard Friedrich Ferdinand Castle [kastle] was an Austrian-German Germanist and literary historian . He participated in the establishment of the Wiener Volkskonservatorium. He taught as a professor at Vienna University . He retired in 1949.
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Walther Judeich
1859 - 1942 (83 years)
Walther Judeich was a German ancient historian. His grandfather on his mother's side was publisher Heinrich Brockhaus . He studied history at the Universities of Tübingen, Leipzig and Strasbourg. From 1886 to 1888 he took part in archaeological excavations in Greece and Asia Minor, followed by research in Rome, Pompeii and Sicily . Later on, he taught classes at the Universities of Marburg, Czernowitz and Erlangen. From 1907 to 1931 he was a professor of ancient history at the University of Jena. His successor at Jena was Fritz Schachermeyr.
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Vasily Zubov
1900 - 1963 (63 years)
Vasily Pavlovich Zubov was a Russian and Soviet philosopher who wrote on architecture, art, and the history of science based on studies of texts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He received a posthumous George Sarton medal from the history of science society in 1963.
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Costa Chekrezi
1892 - 1959 (67 years)
Costa Chekrezi , also known as Constantin Anastas Chekrezi was an Albanian patriot, historian, and publicist. Biography Chekrezi was born on 31 March 1892 in Ziçisht village, in the Upper Devoll region located near Korça . After finishing a 5-year school in his native village, he finished the Greek high school in the town of Korça on June 12, 1910. The school documents show he was awarded as "excellent student in all subjects", and earned a scholarship from the Ottoman government to attend the law school in Thessaloniki, now Greece. The studies were interrupted by the start of the First World War.
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Garry Tregidga
1900 - Present (126 years)
Garry Harcourt Tregidga is a Cornish academic, director of the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall, UK, and editor of the journal Cornish Studies. He lives in Bugle, near St Austell, and was named as a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedh for services to Cornish history, taking the name "Map Rosvean" - "Son of Rosevean".
Go to Profile#7722
Johan Carel Marinus Warnsinck
1882 - 1943 (61 years)
J.C.M. Warnsinck was a Dutch naval officer and naval historian. Johan Carel Marinus Warnsinck was the son of the notary Cornelis Warnsinck and his wife, Tettje Halbertsma. He entered the Royal Naval Academy at Den Helder in 1899 and was commissioned an officer in the Royal Netherlands Navy in 1903, eventually rising to the rank of captain in 1930. In 1919, he married Catarina Elisabeth Delprat and they had one son and a daughter.
Go to Profile#7723
Effie Mona Mack
1888 - 1969 (81 years)
Effie Mona Mack was an American historian, educator, and textbook co-author. She is said to be the only person to have received a Doctorate degree in History of Nevada. The Mack Social Science building at the University of Nevada, Reno is named in her honor. She received a bachelor's degree from Smith College, a Master's at the University of Nevada , and a Ph.D. from the University of California . She taught at the University of Nevada, Reno, and at Nevada Southern, which became the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Go to Profile#7724
Hubert Essame
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Major General Hubert Essame, was a British Army officer who fought in the First and Second World Wars. He was also a military lecturer, historian and broadcaster. Military career Born on 24 December 1896, Hubert Essame was the son of Ernest H. Essame of Wokingham. He was educated at Nottingham High School.
Go to Profile#7725
Bibhutibhushan Datta
1888 - 1958 (70 years)
Bibhutibhushan Datta was a historian of Indian mathematics. Datta came from a poor Bengali family. He was a student of Ganesh Prasad, studied at University of Calcutta and secured the master's degree in mathematics in 1914 and doctorate degree in 1920 in applied mathematics. He taught at Calcutta University where he was lecturer at University Science College, and from 1924 to 1929 he was Rhashbehari Ghosh Professor of Applied Mathematics. During the 1920s and 1930s he created a reputation as an authority on the history of Indian mathematics. He was also deeply interested in Indian philosophy and religion.
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Kurt Köster
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
Kurt Köster, also spelled Koetser , was a German librarian and historian. Life and work Köster was the son of Daniel Köster and his wife Emilie, née Loev. In 1930 he graduated from the Wiesbaden high school on Zietenring and then attended the Pedagogical Academy in Frankfurt am Main. Köster worked as a primary school teacher from 1932 to 1939 then studied history, historical auxiliary sciences, German and musicology in Frankfurt and Munich. On 9 September 1942 he was drafted into the German army. He received his doctorate on 12 February 1944 in Frankfurt on the subject of "The Colmar historical sources of the thirteenth century".
Go to Profile#7727
L. P. Wenham
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Leslie Peter Wenham FSA was a British archaeologist, historian, and professor who excavated in York, on Hadrian's Wall and Malton. He was the first to produce a comprehensive report of a Romano-British Cemetery.
Go to Profile#7728
Noboru Niida
1904 - 1966 (62 years)
Noboru Niida was a Japanese academic, historian of Chinese legal history and Professor Emeritus of Oriental Laws at the University of Tokyo . Biography In 1925, Niida began his studies at the University of Tokyo, where he would eventually be awarded his doctorate. Niida was a professor and legal history scholar at the University of Tokyo. Among the students he influenced was Denis Twitchett, who studied with him in Tokyo in 1953-54. He is known for having written Chinese legal System which has been the subject of a multi-year process of translation into English.
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Audrey Beecham
1915 - 1989 (74 years)
Helen Audrey Beecham was an English poet, teacher and historian. She was born in Weaverham in 1915. Her grandfather was Sir Joseph Beecham, 1st Baronet, eldest son of Thomas Beecham, who had created a fortune with Beecham's Pills. Her uncle was the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham and her father devoted time to spending his inheritance. She took PPE at Somerville College in Oxford. She left with a second class degree and went to live in Paris in the group that included Henry Miller. She made a lasting friendship with the writers Lawrence Durrell and Anais Nin.
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Antonio Oliver
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Antonio Oliver was a Spanish writer, poet, literary critic and historian of Spanish art. He was also a part of the Generation of '27, a group of artists and poets that specialized in the avant-garde.
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Helen Sutermeister
1943 - 1979 (36 years)
Helen Sutermeister was a historian and archaeologist involved in the program of Industrial Archaeology in Ontario. Sutermeister was Curatorial Assistant in the Canadiana Department of Royal Ontario Museum, and was a founding “member of the Norwich Survey within the Centre of East Anglian Studies”. Since her early death , the Helen Sutermeister Memorial Fund was created and Helen Sutermeister memorial lectures are given at the Centre of East Anglian Studies of the University of East Anglia. After returning from Canada she married and settled in Loddon Norfolk whilst working at the University ...
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Leicester Bodine Holland
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Leicester Bodine Holland was an American architect, art historian and archaeologist and holder of the Carnegie Chair at the Library of Congress. Holland was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of Dr. James W. Holland and Mary Boggs Holland. His father was the Dean of the Jefferson Medical College; and when he graduated from William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia in 1898 Leicester Holland originally intended to also become a doctor. However, instead he went into architecture and after he received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1902 he gained a further Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture in 1904.
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Louis Kollros
1878 - 1959 (81 years)
Louis Kollros was a Swiss mathematician. From 1909 to 1948 he was a professor ordinarius of geometry at ETH Zurich. Kollros, the son of a baker, was from 1896 as a student of mathematics and physics at the Zurich Polytechnikum, where he was a fellow student of Albert Einstein and Marcel Grossmann. After graduating in 1900, Kollros taught mathematics from 1900 to 1909 in secondary school in his hometown of La Chaux-de-Fonds. In 1903–1904 to 1909 he studied in Göttingen with Hermann Minkowski and David Hilbert. From 1904 to 1909 Kollross was a privat-docent at the University of Neuchâtel. He ...
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Victor Tcherikover
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Victor A. Tcherikover was a Russian-born Israeli scholar. Biography Born in Russia, he settled in Palestine in 1925. He was one of the first teachers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and headed the departments of general history and classical studies. He specialized in Jewish history in Palestine and Egypt during the Graeco-Roman period.
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Milada Paulová
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Milada Paulová was a Czech historian and Byzantologist, and the first female professor at Charles University, Prague. Early life and education Paulová was born in Loukov in Bohemia. Her mother died when she was three years old, and her father was the director of a sugarcane factory. When the factory went bankrupt, the family moved to Prague, where she completed her education at the teachers' school for girls. As the leaving exam for this school was not recognized by the university, she studied independently to take the final exam for Prague Grammar School, which she passed.
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R. C. Majumdar
1888 - 1980 (92 years)
Ramesh Chandra Majumdar was a historian and professor of Indian history. Majumdar is a noted historian of modern India. He was a former Sheriff of Kolkata. Early life and education Coming from a Baidya family, Majumdar was born in Khandarpara, Gopalganj, Bengal Presidency, British India on 4 December 1888, to Haladhara Majumdar and Bidhumukhi. In 1905, he passed his Entrance Examination from Ravenshaw College, Cuttack. In 1907, he passed F.A. with first class scholarship from Surendranath College and joined Presidency College, Calcutta. Graduating in B.A. and M.A. in 1909 and 1911, respecti...
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Garnie W. McGinty
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Garnie William McGinty was a historian whose career was principally based for thirty-five years at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana. Biography McGinty was born in Bienville Parish in north Louisiana between Ringgold and Bienville to Alonzo Eugene McGinty and the former Maude Leshe. He was educated in local schools and attended Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College in Pineville and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. He procured the Master of Arts degree from Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee. He also studied at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and the University of Chicago in Illinois before he received his Ph.D.
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Ephraim Douglass Adams
1865 - 1930 (65 years)
Ephraim Douglass Adams was an American educator and historian, regarded as an expert on the American Civil War and British-American relations. He was known as a great teacher, with the ability to inspire teachers and researchers, and his presentation style was copied by Stanford historian Thomas A. Bailey.
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J. A. C. Chandler
1872 - 1934 (62 years)
Julian Alvin Carroll Chandler , usually cited as J. A. C. Chandler, was an American historian, author and educator. He is best known as the 18th president of The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he served as the successor to retiring fellow educator and author Lyon Gardiner Tyler. Dr. Chandler is credited with transforming the institution from a small, struggling liberal arts college for men into a modern coeducational institution of higher learning.
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Joseph Bradfield Thoburn
1866 - 1941 (75 years)
Joseph Bradfield Thoburn was an educator, civic leader, writer, and historian. Education In 1893, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in agriculture from Kansas State University, and was largely self-trained in a variety of other fields, such as archaeology and journalism. In 1896, he moved to Oklahoma City. He did scholarship on the history of Oklahoma, joined the History faculty at the University of Oklahoma, served for 38 years, and was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.
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Charles Rowley
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Charles Dunford Rowley was an Australian public servant and academic. Early life and education Rowley was born in Rylstone, New South Wales on 13 October 1906 and grew up in country towns of central New South Wales. Attending the University of Sydney, he graduated with a BA with first-class honours in English and history in 1926, and also gained first-class honours for his Masters thesis in 1939. He taught in State secondary schools from 1928 to 1938, when he was appointed a lecturer at Sydney Teachers' College.
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Veselin Beshevliev
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Veselin Ivanov Beshevliev was a Bulgarian historian and philologist. He was a correspondent member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences from 1941 to his death. He was the author of Old Bulgarian Inscriptions.
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Oswald Redlich
1858 - 1944 (86 years)
Oswald Redlich was an Austrian historian and archivist, known for contributions made in the field of auxiliary sciences of history. Biography He studied history under Julius von Ficker at the University of Innsbruck , then studied historical auxiliary sciences with Theodor von Sickel at the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung in Vienna . From 1881 to 1892 he worked as an archivist in Innsbruck, and in the meantime, obtained his habilitation for historical auxiliary sciences . From 1888 to 1912, with Emil von Ottenthal, he published the Archiv-Berichte aus Tirol . In 1893 he beca...
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Ernest Lavisse
1842 - 1922 (80 years)
Ernest Lavisse was a French historian. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Biography He was born at Le Nouvion-en-Thiérache, Aisne. In 1865 he obtained a fellowship in history, and in 1875 became a doctor of letters; he was appointed maître de conférence at the École Normale Supérieure, succeeding Fustel de Coulanges, and then professor of modern history at the Sorbonne , in the place of Henri Wallon. He was an eloquent professor and very fond of young people, and played an important part in the revival of higher studies in France after 1871. His learning was displ...
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Jawad Ali
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Jawad Ali was an Iraqi historian and academic specializing in Islamic and Arabic history. He received his doctorate from Hamburg University in 1939 and is known for his book, The history of the Arabs before Islam which became one of the most referenced works on the history of Arabs before Islam. Jawad Ali worked in the Department of History at the Faculty of Education at the University of Baghdad beginning in the 1950s.
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Santo Mazzarino
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Santo Mazzarino was an Italian historian considered to be a leading 20th-century historian of ancient Rome. He was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. Mazzarino was born in Catania. As a scholar and faculty member of the University of Catania and University of Rome La Sapienza, Mazzarino was viewed as one of Italy's leading historians. His influential book La fine del mondo antico examined the death of Rome as a result of decadence. The book was widely read among non-specialists as well and has been translated into several languages. Mazzarino's primary historical contributions covered sub...
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Fritz Kern
1884 - 1950 (66 years)
Fritz Kern was a German medievalist historian who became involved in politics. He held teaching chairs on History at Frankfurt University between 1914 and 1922, and at Bonn University between 1922 and 1946.
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Ernst Stein
1891 - 1945 (54 years)
Ernst Edward Aurel Stein was an Austrian-Jewish Byzantinist and a historian of Late Antiquity. Ernst was the son of Ernst Eduard Stein and Henrietta Rosalie and the nephew of the Hungarian-born British archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein. He married Johanna Brandeis in Vienna on 4 April 1923.
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Thomas W. Talley
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Thomas Washington Talley was a chemistry professor at Fisk University and a collector of African American folk songs. Early life and education Thomas Washington Talley was born on October 9, 1868, in Shelbyville, Tennessee. He was one of eight children born to former slaves, Charles Washington and Lucinda Talley.
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Hermann Dessau
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Hermann Dessau was a German ancient historian and epigrapher. He is noted for a key work of textual criticism published in 1889 on the Historia Augusta, which uncovered reasons to believe that this surviving text of ancient Roman imperial history had been written under circumstances very different from those previously believed.
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