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,
#151
Klaus Hildebrand
#4582
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Klaus Hildebrand is a German liberal-conservative historian whose area of expertise is 19th–20th-century German political and military history. Biography Hildebrand is an intentionalist on the origins of the Holocaust question, arguing that the personality and role of Adolf Hitler was a crucial driving force behind the Final Solution. Writing in 1979, Hildebrand stated:
Go to Profile#152
Lonnie Bunch
#13514
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Lonnie G. Bunch III is an American educator and historian. Bunch is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the first African American and first historian to serve as head of the Smithsonian. He has spent most of his career as a history museum curator and administrator.
Go to Profile#153
Walid Khalidi
#4960
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Walid Khalidi is a Palestinian historian who has written extensively on the Palestinian exodus. He is a co-founder of the Institute for Palestine Studies, established in Beirut in December 1963 as an independent research and publishing center focusing on the Palestine problem and the Arab–Israeli conflict, and was its General Secretary until 2016.
Go to Profile#154
La Malinche
#2715
Overall Influence
Marina or Malintzin , more popularly known as La Malinche , a Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast, became known for contributing to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire , by acting as an interpreter, advisor, and intermediary for the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. She was one of 20 enslaved women given to the Spaniards in 1519 by the natives of Tabasco. Cortés chose her as a consort, and she later gave birth to his first son, Martín – one of the first Mestizos in New Spain.
Go to Profile#155
G. E. M. de Ste. Croix
#11082
Overall Influence
1910 - 2000 (90 years)
Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Ste. Croix, , known informally as Croicks, was a British historian who specialised in examining Ancient Greece from a Marxist perspective. He was Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at New College, Oxford, from 1953 to 1977, where he taught scholars including Robin Lane Fox, Robert Parker and Nicholas Richardson.
Go to Profile#156
Martin Gilbert
#3256
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Sir Martin John Gilbert was a British historian and honorary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He was the author of 88 books, including works on Winston Churchill, the 20th century, and Jewish history including the Holocaust. He was a member of the Chilcot Inquiry into Britain's role in the Iraq War.
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William Manchester
#3184
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
William Raymond Manchester was an American author, biographer, and historian. He was the author of 18 books which have been translated into over 20 languages. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal and the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award.
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František Šmahel
#25256
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
František Šmahel is a Czech historian of medieval political and intellectual history, known for his works about Hussitism, universities in the Middle Ages, humanism, and Monarch representation in the Middle Ages. He is a globally-recognized expert on the Bohemian Reformation and the medieval Prague University. His scholarly activities are diverse, covering historical figures , university texts, political history, research into rituals, and the publication of source editions.
Go to Profile#159
David P. Chandler
#1291
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
David Porter Chandler is an American historian and academic who is regarded as one of the foremost western scholars of Cambodia's modern history. Chandler currently resides in Australia, where he is an emeritus professor at Monash University as well as an adjunct professor of Asian Studies at Georgetown University.
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Julian Bond
#1672
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Horace Julian Bond was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee . In 1971, he co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and served as its first president for nearly a decade.
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Adam Tooze
#4038
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
John Adam Tooze is an English historian who is a professor at Columbia University, Director of the European Institute and nonresident scholar at Carnegie Europe. Previously, he was Reader in Twentieth-Century History at the University of Cambridge and Gurnee Hart Fellow in History at Jesus College, Cambridge. After leaving Cambridge in 2009, he spent six years at Yale University as Professor of Modern German History and Director of International Security Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, succeeding Paul Kennedy. Through his books and his online newsletter , ...
Go to Profile#162
Odd Arne Westad
#6402
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Odd Arne Westad FBA is a Norwegian historian specializing in the Cold War and contemporary East Asian history. He is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University, where he teaches in the Yale History Department and in the Jackson School of Global Affairs. Previously, Westad held the S.T. Lee Chair of US-Asia Relations at Harvard University, teaching in the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Westad has also taught at the London School of Economics, where he served as director of LSE IDEAS. In the spring semester 2019 Westad was Boeing Company Chair in International...
Go to Profile#163
Philip Jenkins
#2535
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Philip Jenkins is a professor of history at Baylor University in the United States, and co-director for Baylor's Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion. He is also the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University . He was professor and a distinguished professor of history and religious studies at the same institution; and also assistant, associate and then full professor of criminal justice and American studies at PSU, 1980–93.
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Daniel Goldhagen
#4215
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is an American author, and former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust: Hitler's Willing Executioners , and A Moral Reckoning . He is also the author of Worse Than War , which examines the phenomenon of genocide, and The Devil That Never Dies , in which he traces a worldwide rise in virulent antisemitism.
Go to Profile#165
Geoffrey Hosking
#9454
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Geoffrey Alan Hosking is a British historian of Russia and the Soviet Union and formerly Leverhulme Research Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College, London. He also co-founded Nightline.
Go to Profile#166
Paul Bairoch
#11290
Overall Influence
1930 - 1999 (69 years)
Paul Bairoch was a Swiss economic historian of Belgian descent who specialized in urban history and historical demography. He published or co-authored more than two dozen books and 120 scholarly articles. His most important works emphasize the agricultural preconditions necessary for industrialization and controversially claim, contrary to most scholars that colonization was not beneficial to colonial empires. He argued that tariffs and growth were positively correlated in the 19th century.
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Reinhart Koselleck
#8378
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
Reinhart Koselleck was a German historian. He is widely considered to be one of the most important historians of the 20th century. He occupied a distinctive position within history, working outside of any pre-established 'school', while making pioneering contributions to conceptual history , the epistemology of history, linguistics, the foundations of anthropology of history and social history, and the history of law and government.
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Perry Anderson
#1920
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Francis Rory Peregrine "Perry" Anderson is a British intellectual, historian and essayist. His work ranges across historical sociology, intellectual history, and cultural analysis. What unites Anderson's work is a preoccupation with Western Marxism.
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Jaroslav Pelikan
#5142
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. was an American scholar of the history of Christianity, Christian theology, and medieval intellectual history at Yale University. Early years Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. was born on December 17, 1923, in Akron, Ohio, to a Slovak father Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Sr. and Slovak mother Anna Buzekova Pelikan from Šid in Serbia. His father was pastor of Trinity Slovak Lutheran Church in Chicago, Illinois. His paternal grandfather was a Lutheran pastor in Chicago, and in 1902, a charter founder, and later president of, the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, which until 1958 wa...
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Douglas Brinkley
#4848
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Douglas Brinkley is an American author, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities, and professor of history at Rice University. Brinkley is a history commentator for CNN, Presidential Historian for the New York Historical Society, and a contributing editor to the magazine Vanity Fair. He is a public spokesperson on conservation issues. He joined the faculty of Rice University as a professor of history in 2007.
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Raul Hilberg
#3273
Overall Influence
1926 - 2007 (81 years)
Raul Hilberg was a Jewish Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust. Christopher R. Browning has called him the founding father of Holocaust Studies and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as seminal for research into the Nazi Final Solution.
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Kevin O'Rourke
#7762
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke, is an Irish economist and historian, who specialises in economic history and international economics. Since 2019, he has been Professor of Economics at New York University Abu Dhabi. He was Professor of Economics at Trinity College, Dublin from 2000 to 2011, and had previously taught at Columbia University and University College, Dublin. From 2011 to 2019, he was Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
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Bruce Cumings
#3191
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Bruce Cumings is an American historian of East Asia, professor, lecturer and author. He is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History, and the former chair of the history department at the University of Chicago. He formerly taught at Northwestern University and the University of Washington. He specializes in modern Korean history and contemporary international relations.
Go to Profile#174
Edmund Morgan
#7167
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Edmund Sears Morgan was an American historian and an eminent authority on early American history. He was the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, where he taught from 1955 to 1986. He specialized in American colonial history, with some attention to English history. Thomas S. Kidd says he was noted for his incisive writing style, "simply one of the best academic prose stylists America has ever produced." He covered many topics, including Puritanism, political ideas, the American Revolution, slavery, historiography, family life, and numerous notables such as Benjamin Franklin.
Go to Profile#175
Kenneth M. Stampp
#8765
Overall Influence
1912 - 2009 (97 years)
Kenneth Milton Stampp , Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley , was a celebrated historian of slavery, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University and Colgate University, Commonwealth Lecturer at the University of London, Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Munich, and held the Harmsworth Chair at Oxford University. In 1989, he received the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction. In 1993, he won the prestigious Lincoln Prize for lifetime achievement ...
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Halil İnalcık
#6082
Overall Influence
1916 - 2016 (100 years)
Halil İnalcık was a Turkish historian. His highly influential research centered on social and economic approaches to the Ottoman Empire. His academic career started at Ankara University, where he completed his PhD and worked between 1940 and 1972. Between 1972 and 1986 he taught Ottoman history at the University of Chicago. From 1994 on he taught at Bilkent University, where he founded the history department. He was a founding member of Eurasian Academy.
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Max Hastings
#2663
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings is a British journalist and military historian, who has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, and editor of the Evening Standard. He is also the author of thirty books, most significantly histories, which have won several major awards. Hastings currently writes a bimonthly column for Bloomberg Opinion and contributes to The Times and The Sunday Times.
Go to Profile#178
Christopher Browning
#4524
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Christopher Robert Browning is an American historian and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting the Final Solution, the behavior of those implementing Nazi policies, and the use of survivor testimony. He is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men and The Origins of the Final Solution .
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Margaret MacMillan
#5486
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
#180
Peter Benjamin Golden
#5386
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Peter Benjamin Golden is an American historian who is "professor emeritus" of History, Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University. He has written many books and articles on Turkic and Central Asian studies, such as An introduction to the history of the Turkic peoples.
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James W. Loewen
#9213
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
James William Loewen was an American sociologist, historian, and author. He was best known for his 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Early life Loewen was born in Decatur, Illinois, on February 6, 1942. His father, David, was a medical director and physician from an immigrant Mennonite community; his mother, Winifred , was a librarian and teacher. Loewen was raised in Decatur, where he attended MacArthur High School and was a National Merit Scholar as a graduate in 1960.
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N. G. L. Hammond
#15513
Overall Influence
1907 - 2001 (94 years)
Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond, was a British historian, geographer, classicist and an operative for the British Special Operations Executive in occupied Greece during the Second World War. Hammond was seen as the leading expert on the history of ancient Macedonia. He was recognized for his meticulous research on the geography, historical topography and history of ancient Macedonia and ancient Epirus.
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Jacques Revel
#10580
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jacques Revel is a French historian. He is the emeritus director of studies and past president of l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales . Publications with Michel de Certeau and Dominique Julia, Une politique de la langue. La Révolution française et les patois. L'enquête de Grégoire , Paris, 1975 ; rééd. augmentée d'une postface de D. Julia et J. Revel, Paris, Gallimard, Folio, 2002.with Dominique Julia and Roger Chartier, Histoire sociale des populations étudiantes, Paris, EHES, 2 vol., Jeux d'échelle, Paris, Le Seuil-Gallimard, 1996with François Hartog , Les usages politiques du passé, Enquête, Paris, éditions de l'EHESS, 2001.with G.
Go to Profile#184
Samuel P. Hays
#16609
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Samuel Pfrimmer Hays was a pioneering environmental, social and political historian. Born in Corydon, Indiana and raised on a local dairy farm. He earned a graduates degree from Swarthmore College in 1948, and a Ph.D. at Harvard University. He authored multiple works including "The Response to Industrialism 1885-1914" in 1957, "Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency," "Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985” and "A History of Environmental Politics since 1945". He established the Archives of Industrial Society at The University of Pittsburgh...
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Frank Ankersmit
#5763
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit is professor of intellectual history and historical theory at the University of Groningen. Ankersmit, member of the family of textile manufacturers Ankersmit, initially studied physics and mathematics in Leiden for three years and then did his military service. He next studied both history and philosophy at the University of Groningen. In 1981 he took his doctoral degree at that same University with a dissertation entitled Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. In 1986 he was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences .
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
#2866
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Doris Helen Kearns Goodwin is an American biographer, historian, former sports journalist, and political commentator. She has written biographies of numerous U.S. presidents. Goodwin's book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995. Goodwin produced the American television miniseries Washington. She was also executive producer of 'Abraham Lincoln,' a 2022 docudrama on the History Channel. This latter series was based on Goodwin's Leadership in Turbulent Times.
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Michael Howard
#6778
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Sir Michael Eliot Howard was an English military historian, formerly Chichele Professor of the History of War, Honorary Fellow of All Souls College, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, and founder of the Department of War Studies, King's College London. In 1958, he co-founded the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
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Raymond Carr
#7425
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
Sir Albert Raymond Maillard Carr was an English historian specialising in the history of Spain, Latin America, and Sweden. From 1968 to 1987, he was Warden of St Antony's College, Oxford. Early life Carr was born on 11 April 1919 in Bath, Somerset, to Reginald Henry Maillard Carr and his wife Marion . He was educated at Brockenhurst School, then a state secondary school in the New Forest, Hampshire. He then studied at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was elected Gladstone Research Exhibitioner in 1941.
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Jan T. Gross
#5273
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#190
Michael Stürmer
#3876
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Michael Stürmer is a conservative German historian best known for his role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, for his geographical interpretation of German history and for an admiring 2008 biography of the Russian politician Vladimir Putin.
Go to Profile#191
Alan Charles Kors
#10555
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Alan Charles Kors is Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught the intellectual history of the 17th and 18th centuries. He has received both the Lindback Foundation Award and the Ira Abrams Memorial Award for distinguished college teaching. Kors graduated A.B. summa cum laude at Princeton University in 1964, and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in European history at Harvard University.
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Serge Ricard
#4470
Overall Influence
Serge Ricard, a former Fulbright Scholar, is professor of American Civilization at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Ricard specializes in both American foreign policy and civilization. He is co-director with Pierre Melandri of OPEA, the Center for the Study of American Foreign Policy at the same university. Ricard also specializes in the foreign policy of 26th US President, Theodore Roosevelt and serves on the international advisory board of the Roosevelt Study Center in the Netherlands. In October, 2007, Ricard was a featured speaker at the Annual Meeting of the Theodore Roosevelt Association in Bos...
Go to Profile#193
Joyce Appleby
#10087
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Joyce Oldham Appleby was an American historian. She was a professor of history at UCLA. She was president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association . Life Appleby was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Her father was a businessman and she attended public schools in Omaha, Dallas, Kansas City, Evanston, Phoenix and Pasadena.
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Martin Jay
#2290
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Martin Evan Jay is an American intellectual historian whose research interests connected history with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, social theory, cultural criticism, and historiography.
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Andrey Zubov
#8105
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Andrey Borisovich Zubov is a Russian historian, religion scholar and political scientist, Doctor of History, prominent public person, church figure, political activist and commentator. He was also the Vice-president of the former People's Freedom Party.
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Ibram X. Kendi
#4844
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Ibram Xolani Kendi is an American author, professor, anti-racist activist, and historian of race and discriminatory policy in America. In July 2020, he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University where he as director. Kendi was included in Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2020. Kendi has attracted criticism for his comments on Amy Coney Barrett as well as for alleged financial mismanagement of the Center for Antiracist Research.
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Robert Hughes
#2545
Overall Influence
1938 - 2012 (74 years)
Robert Studley Forrest Hughes AO was an Australian-born art critic, writer, and producer of television documentaries. He was described in 1997 by Robert Boynton of The New York Times as "the most famous art critic in the world."
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Ilan Pappé
#4666
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian and political scientist. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university's European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies.
Go to Profile#199
Cho-yun Hsu
#13859
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Cho-yun Hsu is a historian born in Xiamen, China, of Wuxi ancestry. His family moved to Taiwan after the Chinese Communist Revolution. He graduated from National Taiwan University and University of Chicago and held academic positions in Academia Sinica in Taiwan , before moving to University of Pittsburgh in 1970. He was elected as a Member of the Academica Sinica in 1980.
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Tzvetan Todorov
#1051
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Tzvetan Todorov was a Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, structuralist literary critic, sociologist and essayist. He was the author of many books and essays, which have had a significant influence in anthropology, sociology, semiotics, literary theory, intellectual history and culture theory.
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