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,
#8051
Bruno Bauer
1809 - 1882 (73 years)
Bruno Bauer was a German philosopher and theologian. As a student of G. W. F. Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism. Bauer investigated the sources of the New Testament and, beginning with Hegel's analysis of Christianity's Hellenic as well as Jewish roots, concluded that early Christianity owed more to ancient Greek philosophy than to Judaism.
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Shiratori Kurakichi
1865 - 1942 (77 years)
Shiratori Kurakichi was a Japanese historian and Sinologist who was one of the pioneers of the field of "Oriental History". Biography Shiratori graduated from Tokyo Imperial University and joined the staff of Gakushūin University in 1890. He later returned to Tokyo Imperial University where he became a professor. Kurakichi had, at one time, studied under Ludwig Riess, who was himself a former student of Leopold von Ranke. In 1905, he founded the Asia Research Society .
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Kalhana
Kalhana was the author of Rajatarangini , an account of the history of Kashmir. He wrote the work in Sanskrit between 1148 and 1149. All information regarding his life has to be deduced from his own writing, a major scholar of which is Mark Aurel Stein.
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Chandragupta Maurya
340 BC - 297 BC (43 years)
Chandragupta Maurya was the founder of the Maurya Empire, a geographically-extensive empire based in Magadha. He reigned from 320 BCE to 298 BCE. The Magadha kingdom expanded to become an empire that reached its peak under the reign of his grandson, Ashoka the Great, from 268 BCE to 231 BCE. The nature of the political formation that existed in Chandragupta's time is not certain. The Mauryan empire was a loose-knit one with large autonomous regions within its limits.
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Emperor Taizong of Tang
598 - 649 (51 years)
Emperor Taizong of Tang , previously Prince of Qin, personal name Li Shimin, was the second emperor of the Tang dynasty of China, ruling from 626 to 649. He is traditionally regarded as a co-founder of the dynasty for his role in encouraging his father Li Yuan to rebel against the Sui dynasty at Jinyang in 617. Taizong subsequently played a pivotal role in defeating several of the dynasty's most dangerous opponents and solidifying its rule over China proper.
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Ralph Abernathy
1926 - 1990 (64 years)
Ralph David Abernathy Sr. was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was ordained in the Baptist tradition in 1948. As a leader of the civil rights movement, he was a close friend and mentor of Martin Luther King Jr. He collaborated with King and E. D. Nixon to create the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led to the Montgomery bus boycott, and co-created and was an executive board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference . He became president of the SCLC following the assassination of King in 1968; he led the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., as well as other marches and demonstrations for disenfranchised Americans.
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Hugh Capet
940 - 996 (56 years)
Hugh Capet was the King of the Franks from 987 to 996. He is the founder of and first king from the House of Capet. The son of the powerful duke Hugh the Great and his wife Hedwige of Saxony, he was elected as the successor of the last Carolingian king, Louis V. Hugh was descended from Charlemagne's son Pepin of Italy through his mother and paternal grandmother, respectively, and was also a nephew of Otto the Great.
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Thomas Cromwell
1485 - 1540 (55 years)
Thomas Cromwell , briefly Earl of Essex, was an English statesman and lawyer who served as chief minister to King Henry VIII from 1534 to 1540, when he was beheaded on orders of the king, who later blamed false charges for the execution.
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Walter Rodney
1942 - 1980 (38 years)
Walter Anthony Rodney was a Guyanese historian, political activist and academic. His notable works include How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, first published in 1972. Rodney was assassinated in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1980.
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Orosius
385 - 418 (33 years)
Paulus Orosius , less often Paul Orosius in English, was a Roman priest, historian and theologian, and a student of Augustine of Hippo. It is possible that he was born in Bracara Augusta , then capital of the Roman province of Gallaecia, which would have been the capital of the Kingdom of the Suebi by his death. Although there are some questions regarding his biography, such as his exact date of birth, it is known that he was a person of some prestige from a cultural point of view, as he had contact with the greatest figures of his time such as Augustine of Hippo and Jerome of Stridon. In orde...
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Theophanes the Confessor
759 - 817 (58 years)
Theophanes the Confessor was a member of the Byzantine aristocracy who became a monk and chronicler. He served in the court of Emperor Leo IV the Khazar before taking up the religious life. Theophanes attended the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 and resisted the iconoclasm of Leo V the Armenian, for which he was imprisoned. He died shortly after his release.
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Ahmad Shah Durrani
1722 - 1772 (50 years)
Ahmad Shāh Durrānī , also known as Ahmad Shāh Abdālī , was the founder of the Durrani Empire and is often regarded as the founder of the modern Afghanistan. In June 1747, Ahmad Shah was appointed as King of the Afghans by a loya jirga in Kandahar, where he set up his capital. Primarily with the support of the Pashtun tribes, Ahmad Shah pushed east towards the Mughal and Maratha Empires of India, west towards the disintegrating Afsharid Empire of Iran, and north towards the Khanate of Bukhara of Turkestan. Within a few years, he extended his control from Khorasan in the west to North India in t...
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Will Durant
1885 - 1981 (96 years)
William James Durant was an American historian and philosopher, best known for his 11-volume work, The Story of Civilization, which contains and details the history of Eastern and Western civilizations. It was written in collaboration with his wife, Ariel Durant, and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy , described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy".
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Yevgeny Tarle
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Yevgeny Viktorovich Tarle was a Russian and Soviet historian and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is known for his books about Napoleon's invasion of Russia and on the Crimean War, as well as many other works. Yevgeny Tarle was one of the founders of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Russia's diplomatic university.
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Constantine VII
905 - 959 (54 years)
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus was the fourth Byzantine emperor of the Macedonian dynasty, reigning from 6 June 913 to 9 November 959. He was the son of Emperor Leo VI and his fourth wife, Zoe Karbonopsina, and the nephew of his predecessor Alexander.
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Thomas Arnold
1795 - 1842 (47 years)
Thomas Arnold was an English educator and historian. He was an early supporter of the Broad Church Anglican movement. As headmaster of Rugby School from 1828 to 1841, he introduced several reforms that were widely copied by other noted public schools. His reforms redefined standards of masculinity and achievement.
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Mikhail Koyalovich
1828 - 1891 (63 years)
Mikhail Koyalovich was a Russian historian, political journalist and publisher of the Belarusian descent. Representative of the “West Russian” historical school. He studied at St. Petersburg Theological Academy, where he held the first chair of comparative theology and Russian division, then chair of Russian history of the civil and ecclesiastical, after the separation of the subject into two independent departments - civil Russian history. In 1859, published the first volume of his master's thesis: "The Lithuanian church union" in 1862. - The second volume of. In "Day" IS. Aksakov put his le...
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Barbara W. Tuchman
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August , a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China , a biography of General Joseph Stilwell.
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James Henry Breasted
1865 - 1935 (70 years)
James Henry Breasted was an American archaeologist, Egyptologist, and historian. After completing his PhD at the University of Berlin in 1894, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. In 1901 he became director of the Haskell Oriental Museum at the university, where he continued to concentrate on Egypt. In 1905 Breasted was promoted to full professor, and held the first chair in Egyptology and Oriental History in the United States.
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Johan Huizinga
1872 - 1945 (73 years)
Johan Huizinga was a Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history. Life Born in Groningen as the son of Dirk Huizinga, a professor of physiology, and Jacoba Tonkens, who died two years after his birth, he started out as a student of Indo-European languages, earning his degree in 1895. He then studied comparative linguistics, gaining a good command of Sanskrit. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the role of the jester in Indian drama in 1897.
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Constantius II
317 - 361 (44 years)
Constantius II was Roman emperor from 337 to 361. His reign saw constant warfare on the borders against the Sasanian Empire and Germanic peoples, while internally the Roman Empire went through repeated civil wars, court intrigues, and usurpations. His religious policies inflamed domestic conflicts that would continue after his death.
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František Palacký
1798 - 1876 (78 years)
František Palacký was a Czech historian and politician, the most influential person of the Czech National Revival, called "Father of the Nation". Life František Palacký was born on 14 June 1798, at Hodslavice house 108, a northeastern Moravian village now part of the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. His ancestors had been members of the community of the Bohemian Brethren, and had clandestinely maintained their Protestant belief throughout the period of religious persecution, eventually giving their adherence to the Augsburg confession as approximate to their original faith. Palacký's father was a schoolmaster and a man of some learning.
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Chief Joseph
1840 - 1904 (64 years)
Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt , popularly known as Chief Joseph, Young Joseph, or Joseph the Younger , was a leader of the wal-lam-wat-kain band of Nez Perce, a Native American tribe of the interior Pacific Northwest region of the United States, in the latter half of the 19th century. He succeeded his father tuekakas in the early 1870s.
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Chen Shou
233 - 297 (64 years)
Chen Shou , courtesy name Chengzuo , was a Chinese historian, politician, and writer who lived during the Three Kingdoms period and Jin dynasty of China. Chen Shou is best known for his most celebrated work, the Records of the Three Kingdoms , which records the history of the late Eastern Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period. Chen Shou wrote the Sanguozhi primarily in the form of biographies of notable persons of those eras. Today, Chen's Records of the Three Kingdoms is part of the Twenty-Four Histories canon of Chinese history.
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Bartolomé de las Casas
1474 - 1566 (92 years)
Bartolomé de las Casas, OP was a Spanish clergyman, writer, and activist best known for his work as a historian and social reformer. He arrived in Hispaniola as a layman, then became a Dominican friar. He was appointed as the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians". His extensive writings, the most famous being A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization of the West Indies. He described the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the indigenous peoples.
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J. Fred Rippy
1892 - 1977 (85 years)
James Fred Rippy was an American professor, author, and historian of Latin America and American diplomacy. Biography J. Fred Rippy grew up on a subsistence farm in Tennessee until a fire destroyed several farm buildings and forced his parents in 1902 to move to Richardson, Texas to live with relatives. He graduated from high school in 1907 and in 1909 entered Southwestern University, where he graduated in 1913. After teaching for one year at Clebarro College in Cleburne, Texas, he enrolled at Vanderbilt University, where he received an M.A. after one year of study. In 1915 he married Mary Dozier Allen of Nashville, Tennessee.
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Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer
1864 - 1936 (72 years)
Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer was a Swiss folklorist, Germanist and medievalist, from 1900 professor for phonetics, Swiss dialectology and folklore at the University of Basle and founder of the Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde in 1896. His 1902 essay Die Volkskunde als Wissenschaft received international attention.
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Goronwy Edwards
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Sir John Goronwy Edwards was a Welsh historian. Early life Edwards, who was proficient in Welsh before he could read English, was educated at Holywell Grammar School before matriculating at Jesus College, Oxford in 1909. His 1913 essay on Danby gained him proxime accessit in the Stanhope prize competition.
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William Bascom
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
William R. Bascom was an award-winning American folklorist, anthropologist, and museum director. He was a specialist in the art and culture of West Africa and the African Diaspora, especially the Yoruba of Nigeria.
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Marc Bloch
1886 - 1944 (58 years)
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg , the University of Paris , and the University of Montpellier .
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N. S. B. Gras
1884 - 1956 (72 years)
Norman Scott Brien Gras , known as N. S. B. Gras, was a Canadian professor at the Harvard Business School who invented the academic discipline of business history. Early life Gras was born in 1884 in Toronto, Ontario. He graduated from the University of Western Ontario. He went on to receive a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
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John Le Patourel
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
John Herbert Le Patourel was a British medieval historian and professor at the University of Leeds. Biography Le Patourel was born on 29 July 1909 in Guernsey, where his father, Herbert Augustus Le Patourel, was the procureur from 1929 to 1934. He was educated at Elizabeth College, Guernsey and Jesus College, Oxford where he obtained a BA in Modern History in 1931 followed by a DPhil. In 1939 he married Jean Bird , who became an expert in medieval ceramics and was a Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Leeds from 1967 to 1980. They had a daughter and three sons. His brother, Herbe...
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Nora K. Chadwick
1891 - 1972 (81 years)
Nora Kershaw Chadwick CBE FSA FBA was an English philologist who specialized in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Old Norse studies. Early life and education Nora Kershaw was born in Lancashire in 1891, the first daughter of James Kershaw and Emma Clara Booth, married in 1888. Nora's sister Mabel, born in 1895, converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun.
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LeRoy R. Hafen
1893 - 1985 (92 years)
LeRoy Reuben Hafen was a historian of the American West and a Latter-day Saint. For many years he was a professor of history at Brigham Young University . Biography He was born on December 8, 1893, in Bunkerville, Nevada to John George Hafen, a polygamist, and Mary Ann Stucki. He attended high school in Cedar City, Utah for two years and then at the St. George Stake Academy in St. George, Utah. It was in St. George that Hafen met his wife, Ann Woodbury. They were married on 3 September 1915 in the St. George Temple. He received his bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University. After this he taught school in Bunkerville and then was the principal of Virgin Valley High School.
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Earl Lewis
1900 - Present (126 years)
Earl Lewis is the founding director of the Center for Social Solutions and professor of history at the University of Michigan. He was president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 2013 to 2018. Before his appointment as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Lewis served for over eight years as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and as the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and African American Studies at Emory University. He was the university's first African-American provost and at the time the highest-ranking African-American administrator in the...
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Władysław Czapliński
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
Władysław Czapliński was a Polish historian, a professor of the University of Wrocław, author of many popular books about Polish history. He finished his studies at the Jagiellonian University in 1927 in the Second Polish Republic, and for the next several years he was a teacher of history. During the Second World War he took part in the underground education in Poland during World War II. After the war he moved to Wrocław, where he worked at the local university until his retirement in 1975.
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Charles Farwell Edson Jr.
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
Charles Farwell Edson Jr. was an American scholar of Ancient History. Edson was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1905 as the son of poet and musician Charles Farwell Edson and social activist and feminist Katherine Philips Edson, and the great nephew of prominent Chicago businessman John V. Farwell and Senator Charles B. Farwell. Edson received the degree of A.B. in Classics from Stanford University in 1929 . He went on to earn his Ph.D. in History at Harvard University in 1939 with a dissertation entitled “Five Studies in Macedonian History" directed by Professor William Scott Ferguson . ...
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Johannes Tropfke
1866 - 1939 (73 years)
Johannes Tropfke was a German mathematician and teacher, who is best remembered for his influential work on the history of mathematics Geschichte der Elementarmathematik, which consists of seven volumes.
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Philip Wayne Powell
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Philip Wayne Powell was an American historian specializing in the Spanish colonial history of the American Southwest. He was born in Chino, California, attended Occidental College and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his B.A. in 1936. He undertook graduate studies at Berkeley, taking Hispanic studies with Herbert I. Priestley and Herbert E. Bolton. Powell completed his Ph.D. in 1941, and joined the Army.
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Alfons Dopsch
1868 - 1953 (85 years)
Alfons Dopsch was an Austrian social and economic historian who specialised in the history of medieval Europe. He studied at Institut fur Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung and was a professor at the University of Vienna from 1898 to 1936.
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Hermann Strasburger
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
Hermann Strasburger was a German ancient historian. He was the son of the internist Julius Strasburger and grandson of the botanist Eduard Strasburger.
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John F. Benton
1931 - 1988 (57 years)
John F. Benton was the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. Education He graduated from Haverford College, with a BA in 1953, from Princeton University with an MA in 1955, and PhD in 1959. He taught at Reed College and the University of Pennsylvania.
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James Pounder Whitney
1857 - 1939 (82 years)
James Pounder Whitney was a British ecclesiastical historian. Educated at King James's Grammar School, Almondbury and Owens College, Manchester, he was a foundation scholar at King's College, Cambridge, gaining firsts in the mathematics and history triposes in 1881. A fellow of King's College, he was ordained an Anglican priest in 1895. After various clerical and teaching appointment, he was professor of ecclesiastical history at King's College London from 1908 to 1918. He was Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge from 1919 to 1939. He was joint editor of Th...
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Hubert Jedin
1900 - 1980 (80 years)
Hubert Jedin was a Catholic Church historian from Germany, whose publications specialized on the history of ecumenical councils in general and the Council of Trent in particular, on which he published a 2400-page history over the years 1951–1975.
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John Duncan Mackie
1887 - 1978 (91 years)
John Duncan Mackie CBE MC was a distinguished Scottish historian who wrote a one-volume history of Scotland and several works on early modern Scotland. Biography Born in Edinburgh, Mackie was educated at Middlesbrough High School and Jesus College, Oxford, where he took a first-class degree in history and won the Lothian Essay Prize. He was appointed as a lecturer in history at the University of St Andrews in 1909, aged 22. While at the university he introduced the subject of Scottish history into the curriculum.
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Eugene C. Barker
1874 - 1956 (82 years)
Eugene Campbell Barker was an American historian at the University of Texas, the managing director of the Texas State Historical Association, and the editor of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. He chaired the history department while soliciting gifts to the university, which he used to build a collection of archives and artifacts. In 1950, the university dedicated the Eugene C. Barker History Center as a repository for his collections. These collections are an important part of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas.
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Heinz Politzer
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Heinz Politzer was an internationally recognized academic and writer. As a young man he was forced to flee Nazism first to Palestine and then to the United States, where he taught German language and literature as a professor at the Bryn Mawr College, Oberlin College, and the University of California, Berkeley. He was a literary scholar, published poet, and prominent editor, particularly of Franz Kafka. As a close associate of Kafka's protégé, Max Brod, Politzer coedited with Brod the first complete collection of Kafka's works in eight volumes, published initially by the Schocken publishing h...
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John La Nauze
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
John Andrew La Nauze was an Australian historian from Western Australia. He was born in the Goldfields town of Boulder. Shortly after his fourth birthday, his Mauritian-born father Captain Charles La Nauze was killed by Turkish artillery fire at Silt Spur Gallipoli. His mother moved the family to Perth where he attended South Perth Primary School and Perth Modern School. He completed degrees in Arts at the University of Western Australia and at Balliol College, Oxford before joining the Economics Departments at Adelaide and Sydney .
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Louise Ropes Loomis
1874 - 1958 (84 years)
Louise Ropes Loomis was an American historian, classicist, and translator. She was a professor of history at Wells College from 1921 to 1940, and editor of Classics Club Publications from the 1920s until 1949. In 1930, she co-founded the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians with Louise Fargo Brown.
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Wilhelm Dilthey
1833 - 1911 (78 years)
Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in it...
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