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,
#8551
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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George Rawlinson
1812 - 1902 (90 years)
George Rawlinson was a British scholar, historian and Christian theologian. Life Rawlinson was born at Chadlington, Oxfordshire, the son of Abram Tysack Rawlinson and the younger brother of the famous Assyriologist, Sir Henry Rawlinson. He was educated at Ealing School. Having taken a First in Literae Humaniores at the University of Oxford in 1838, he was elected to a fellowship at Exeter College, in 1840, where he was a Fellow and tutor from 1842 to 1846. He was ordained in 1841, was curate at Merton, Oxfordshire, from 1846 to 1847, was Bampton Lecturer in 1859, and was Camden Professor of ...
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James Connolly
1868 - 1916 (48 years)
James Connolly was an Irish republican, socialist, and trade union leader. Born to Irish parents in the Cowgate area of Edinburgh, Scotland, Connolly left school for working life at the age of ten, and became involved in socialist politics in the 1880s.
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Ctesias
500 BC - 400 BC (100 years)
Ctesias , also known as Ctesias of Cnidus, was a Greek physician and historian from the town of Cnidus in Caria, then part of the Achaemenid Empire. Historical events Ctesias, who lived in the fifth century BC, was physician to the Achaemenid king, Artaxerxes II, whom he accompanied in 401 BC on his expedition against his brother Cyrus the Younger. Ctesias was part of the entourage of King Artaxerxes at the Battle of Cunaxa against Cyrus the Younger and his Greek mercenaries called the Ten Thousand, when Ctesias provided medical assistance to the king by treating his flesh wound. He reported...
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Mykhailo Hrushevsky
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
Mykhailo Serhiiovych Hrushevsky was a Ukrainian academician, politician, historian and statesman who was one of the most important figures of the Ukrainian national revival of the early 20th century. Hrushevsky is often considered the country's greatest modern historian, the foremost organiser of scholarship, the leader of the pre-revolution Ukrainian national movement, the head of the Central Rada , and a leading cultural figure in the Ukrainian SSR during the 1920s.
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J. B. Bury
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
John Bagnell Bury was an Anglo-Irish historian, classical scholar, Medieval Roman historian and philologist. He objected to the label "Byzantinist" explicitly in the preface to the 1889 edition of his Later Roman Empire. He was Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin , before being Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of King's College, Cambridge from 1902 until his death.
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François Guizot
1787 - 1874 (87 years)
François Pierre Guillaume Guizot was a French historian, orator, and statesman. Guizot was a dominant figure in French politics prior to the Revolution of 1848. A conservative liberal who opposed the attempt by King Charles X to usurp legislative power, he worked to sustain a constitutional monarchy following the July Revolution of 1830. He then served the "citizen king" Louis Philippe, as Minister of Education, 1832–37, ambassador to London, Foreign Minister 1840–1847, and finally Prime Minister of France from 19 September 1847 to 23 February 1848.
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Sejong the Great
1397 - 1450 (53 years)
Sejong of Joseon , personal name Yi Do , commonly known as Sejong the Great , was the fourth ruler of the Joseon dynasty of Korea and the inventor of Hangul, the native alphabet of the Korean language. Today, he is regarded as one of the greatest leaders in Korean history.
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Philippe Ariès
1914 - 1984 (70 years)
Philippe Ariès was a French medievalist and historian of the family and childhood, in the style of Georges Duby. He wrote many books on the common daily life. His most prominent works regarded the change in the western attitudes towards death.
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C. L. R. James
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Cyril Lionel Robert James , who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, Trotskyist activist and Marxist writer. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of Marxism, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James is the author of the 1937 work World Revolution outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote on the Haitian Revolution, Th...
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Agathias
536 - 582 (46 years)
Agathias Scholasticus was a Greek poet and the principal historian of part of the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian I between 552 and 558. Biography Agathias was a native of Myrina , an Aeolian city in western Asia Minor. His father was Memnonius. His mother was presumably Pericleia. A brother of Agathias is mentioned in primary sources, but his name has not survived. Their probable sister Eugenia is known by name. The Suda clarifies that Agathias was active in the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian I, mentioning him as a contemporary of Paul the Silentiary, Macedonius of Thessalonica an...
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Hilaire Belloc
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc was a Franco-English writer and historian of the early 20th century. Belloc was also an orator, poet, sailor, satirist, writer of letters, soldier, and political activist. His Catholic faith had a strong effect on his works.
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Herodian
170 - 250 (80 years)
Herodian or Herodianus of Syria, sometimes referred to as "Herodian of Antioch" , was a minor Roman civil servant who wrote a colourful history in Greek titled History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus in eight books covering the years 180 to 238. His work is not considered entirely reliable, although his less biased account of Elagabalus may be more useful than that of Cassius Dio. Herodian himself may have been a Syrian , though he appears to have lived for a considerable period of time in Rome, possibly without holding any public office. From his extant work, it seems that he was still living at an advanced age during the reign of Gordianus III, who ascended the throne in 238.
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Whitelaw Reid
1837 - 1912 (75 years)
Whitelaw Reid was an American politician and newspaper editor, as well as the author of Ohio in the War, a popular work of history. After assisting Horace Greeley as editor of the New-York Tribune, Reid purchased the paper after Greeley's death in late 1872 and controlled it until his own death. The circulation grew to about 60,000 a day, but the weekly edition became less important. He invested heavily in new technology, such as the Hoe rotary printing press and the linotype machine, but bitterly fought against the unionized workers for control of his shop.
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Ibn Hazm
994 - 1064 (70 years)
Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm was an Andalusian Muslim polymath, historian, muhaddith, jurist, philosopher, and theologian, born in the Caliphate of Córdoba, present-day Spain. Described as one of the strictest hadith interpreters, Ibn Hazm was a leading proponent and codifier of the Zahiri school of Islamic thought and produced a reported 400 works, of which only 40 still survive. In all, his written works amounted to some 80,000 pages. Described as one of the fathers of comparative religion, the Encyclopaedia of Islam refers to him as having been one of the leading thinkers...
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K. A. Nilakanta Sastri
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Kallidaikurichi Aiyah Nilakanta Sastri was an Indian historian who wrote on South Indian history. Many of his books form the standard reference works on the subject. Sastri was acclaimed for his scholarship and mastery of sources and was a recipient of the third highest Indian civilian honour, the Padma Bhushan.
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Eduard Meyer
1855 - 1930 (75 years)
Eduard Meyer was a German historian. He was the brother of Celticist Kuno Meyer . Biography Meyer was born in Hamburg and educated at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums and later at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. After completing his studies, he spent one year in Istanbul. In 1879, he went to the University of Leipzig as privatdocent. He was appointed professor of ancient history at Breslau in 1885, at Halle in 1889, and at Berlin in 1902. He lectured at Harvard in 1909 and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1910. Honorary degrees were given him by Oxford, St. Andrews, Fre...
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Ulrich Wilcken
1862 - 1944 (82 years)
Ulrich Wilcken was a German historian and papyrologist who was a native of Stettin. Biography Wilcken studied ancient history and Oriental studies in Leipzig, Tübingen and Berlin. He was a disciple of historian Theodor Mommsen , who encouraged Wilcken to take a position as cataloguer of papyri following graduation. Mommsen was also instrumental in Wilcken succeeding Eduard Meyer as associate professor of ancient history at the University of Breslau in 1889. Afterwards, he was a professor at the universities of Würzburg , Halle , Leipzig and Bonn , where he succeeded Heinrich Nissen . Later...
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Stand Watie
1806 - 1871 (65 years)
Brigadier-General Stand Watie , also known as Standhope Uwatie, Tawkertawker, and Isaac S. Watie, was a Cherokee politician who served as the second principal chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1862 to 1866. The Cherokee Nation allied with the Confederate States during the American Civil War and he was the only Native American Confederate general officer of the war. Watie commanded Indian forces in the Trans-Mississippi Theater, made up mostly of Cherokee, Muskogee, and Seminole. He was the last Confederate States Army general to surrender.
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Valerius Maximus
100 BC - 100 (200 years)
Valerius Maximus was a 1st-century Latin writer and author of a collection of historical anecdotes: . He worked during the reign of Tiberius . During the Middle Ages, Valerius Maximus was one of the most copied Latin prose authors, second only to Priscian. More than 600 medieval manuscripts of his books have survived as a result.
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Ludvig Holberg
1684 - 1754 (70 years)
Ludvig Holberg, Baron of Holberg was a writer, essayist, philosopher, historian and playwright born in Bergen, Norway, during the time of the Dano–Norwegian dual monarchy. He was influenced by Humanism, the Enlightenment and the Baroque. Holberg is considered the founder of modern Danish and Norwegian literature. He was also a prominent Neo-Latin author, known across Europe for his writing. He is best known for the comedies he wrote in 1722–1723 for the Lille Grønnegade Theatre in Copenhagen. Holberg's works about natural and common law were widely read by many Danish law students over two hu...
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Hugo Kołłątaj
1750 - 1812 (62 years)
Hugo Stumberg Kołłątaj, also spelled Kołłątay , was a prominent Polish constitutional reformer and educationalist, and one of the most prominent figures of the Polish Enlightenment. He served as Deputy Chancellor of the Crown between 1791–92. He was a Roman Catholic priest, social and political activist, political thinker, historian, philosopher, and polymath.
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Faxian
340 - 422 (82 years)
Faxian , also referred to as Fa-Hien, Fa-hsien and Sehi, was a Chinese Buddhist monk and translator who traveled by foot from China to India to acquire Buddhist texts. Starting his arduous journey about age 60, he visited sacred Buddhist sites in Central, South, and Southeast Asia between 399 and 412 CE, of which 10 years were spent in India.
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Sima Tan
165 BC - 110 BC (55 years)
Sima Tan was a Chinese astronomer/astrologer and historian during the Western Han dynasty. His work Records of the Grand Historian was completed by his son Sima Qian, who is considered the founder of Chinese historiography.
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Harry Elmer Barnes
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Harry Elmer Barnes was an American historian who, in his later years, was known for his historical revisionism and Holocaust denial. After receiving a PhD at Columbia University in 1918 Barnes became a professor of history at Clark University before moving to Smith College as a professor of historical sociology in 1923. In 1929 he left teaching to work as a journalist, freelance writer and occasional adjunct professor at smaller schools. In 1919–20 and between 1923 and 1937 he lectured regularly at the New School for Social Research. Through his prodigious scholarly output, Barnes was once highly regarded as a historian.
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Joannes Zonaras
1074 - 1145 (71 years)
Joannes or John Zonaras was a Byzantine Greek historian, chronicler and theologian who lived in Constantinople . Under Emperor Alexios I Komnenos he held the offices of head justice and private secretary to the emperor, but after Alexios' death, he retired to the monastery on the Island of Hagia Glykeria, , where he spent the rest of his life writing books.
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Adam of Bremen
1100 - 1080 (-20 years)
Adam of Bremen was a German medieval chronicler. He lived and worked in the second half of the eleventh century. Adam is most famous for his chronicle Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum . He was "one of the foremost historians and early ethnographers of the medieval period".
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Gertrude Bell
1868 - 1926 (58 years)
Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist. She spent much of her life exploring and mapping the Middle East, and became highly influential to British imperial policy-making as an Arabist due to her knowledge and contacts built up through extensive travels. During her lifetime, she was highly esteemed and trusted by British officials such as High Commissioner for Mesopotamia Percy Cox, giving her great influence. She participated in both the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the 1921 Cairo Conference, which help...
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Ivane Javakhishvili
1876 - 1940 (64 years)
Ivane Alexandres dze Javakhishvili was a Georgian historian and linguist whose voluminous works heavily influenced the modern scholarship of the history and culture of Georgia. He was one of the founding fathers of the Tbilisi State University and its rector from 1919 to 1926.
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