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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#251
Maulana Karenga
#1679
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga , previously known as Ron Karenga, is an American activist, author and professor of Africana studies, best known as the creator of the pan-African and African-American holiday of Kwanzaa.
Go to Profile#252
Kurt M. Campbell
#7203
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Kurt Michael Campbell is an American diplomat and businessman currently serving as the National Security Council Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific. In this capacity, Campbell has been referred to as the "Asia co-ordinator" or "Asia Tsar" of the Joe Biden administration.
Go to Profile#253
Anne-Marie Slaughter
#5707
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Anne-Marie Slaughter is an American international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, political scientist and public commentator. From 2002 to 2009, she was the dean of Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs and the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 university professor of politics and international affairs. Slaughter was the first woman to serve as the director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department from January 2009 until February 2011 under U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton. She is a former president of the American Society of International Law and the current p...
Go to Profile#254
Adrienne Rich
#513
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
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Bhikhu Parekh
#4753
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Bhikhu Chotalal Parekh, Baron Parekh, is a British political theorist, academic, and life peer. He is a Labour Party member of the House of Lords. He was Professor of Political Theory at the University of Hull from 1982 to 2001, and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Westminster from 2001 to 2009. He served as president of the Academy of Social Sciences from 2003 to 2008.
Go to Profile#256
William Bundy
#7023
Overall Influence
1917 - 2000 (83 years)
William Putnam Bundy was an American attorney and analyst with the CIA. Bundy served as a foreign affairs advisor to both presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He had key roles in planning the Vietnam War, serving as deputy to Paul Nitze at Defense under Kennedy and as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Johnson.
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Bryan Caplan
#1972
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Bryan Douglas Caplan is an American economist and author. Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and former contributor to the Freakonomics blog and EconLog. He currently publishes his own blog, Bet on It. Caplan is a self-described "economic libertarian". The bulk of Caplan's academic work is in behavioral economics and public economics, especially public choice theory.
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Patricia M. Shields
#5873
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Patricia M. Shields is a Regents' Professor in the Political Science Department at Texas State University. Since 2001 she has been Editor-in-Chief of the international and interdisciplinary journal Armed Forces & Society. She is also a Contributing Editor to Parameters: The US Army War College Quarterly and the Section Editor of the Military and Society section to the Handbook of Military Sciences. Shields is notable for her publications focusing on research methods, civil military relations, gender issues, pragmatism in public administration, peace studies, and the contributions of Jane Addams to public administration and peace theory.
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Bo Rothstein
#9767
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Bo Abraham Mendel Rothstein is a Swedish political scientist. He is a former Professor of Government and Public Policy at University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government. Rothstein is a contributor to Swedish public debate about politics and academic freedom. He has been especially critical of what he perceives as politicized research at some universities in Sweden. In 2003, he received the Swedish Association of University Teachers' prize for academic freedom. Rothstein received the prize for having "in the public debate argued for the importance of independent university teaching and ...
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Anatol Lieven
#10541
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Anatol Lieven is a British author, journalist, and policy analyst best known for his expertise on the Taliban of Afghanistan. He is currently a visiting professor at King's College London and senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also a contributor to the Valdai Discussion Club.
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Walter Russell Mead
#6192
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Walter Russell Mead is an American academic. He is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and taught American foreign policy at Yale University. He was also the editor-at-large of The American Interest magazine. Mead is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, and a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs, the quarterly foreign policy journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Go to Profile#262
Michael Lipsky
#15683
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Michael Lipsky is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, a public policy institution based in New York with offices in Washington, D.C., and Boston. He was a program officer at the Ford Foundation after serving as a professor of political science at MIT. In 1998, Lipsky was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
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Mikheil Saakashvili
#6846
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Mikheil Saakashvili is a Georgian and Ukrainian politician and jurist. He was the third president of Georgia for two consecutive terms from 25 January 2004 to 17 November 2013. From May 2015 until November 2016, Saakashvili was the governor of Ukraine's Odesa Oblast. He is the founder and former chairman of the United National Movement party. Saakashvili heads the executive committee of Ukraine's National Reform Council since 7 May 2020. In 2021 he began serving a six-year prison sentence in Georgia on charges of abuse of power and organization of an assault occasioning grievous bodily harm a...
Go to Profile#264
Richard Neustadt
#4586
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Richard Elliott Neustadt was an American political scientist specializing in the United States presidency. He served as adviser to several presidents. His book Presidential Power has been described as "one of the most influential books ever written about political leadership." Thinking In Time: The Uses Of History For Decision Makers won the Grawemeyer Award. His other books include Alliance Politics, Preparing to be President, and, with Harvey V. Fineberg, The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-Making on a Slippery Disease.
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Elmar Altvater
#5861
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Elmar Altvater was Professor of Political Science at the Otto-Suhr-Institut of the Free University of Berlin, before retiring on 30 September 2004. He continued to work at the institute, and published articles and books.
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Mark Lilla
#3835
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mark Lilla is an American political scientist, historian of ideas, journalist, and professor of humanities at Columbia University in New York City. A self-described liberal, he frequently, though not always, presents views from that perspective.
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Cynthia Enloe
#6681
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Cynthia Holden Enloe is an American political theorist, feminist writer, and professor. She is best known for her work on gender and militarism and for her contributions to the field of feminist international relations. She has also influenced the field of feminist political geography, with feminist geopolitics in particular.
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George McGovern
#2676
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
George Stanley McGovern was an American historian and South Dakota politician who was a U.S. representative and three-term U.S. senator, and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election.
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Valerie Amos, Baroness Amos
#5878
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Valerie Ann Amos, Baroness Amos, is a British Labour Party politician and diplomat who served as the eighth UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. Before her appointment to the UN, she served as British High Commissioner to Australia. She was created a life peer in 1997, serving as Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council from 2003 to 2007.
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Jonah Goldberg
#2502
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jonah Jacob Goldberg is an American neoconservative syndicated columnist, author, political analyst, and commentator. The founding editor of National Review Online, from 1998 until 2019, he was an editor at National Review. Goldberg writes a weekly column about politics and culture for the Los Angeles Times. In October 2019, Goldberg became the founding editor of the online opinion and news publication The Dispatch. Goldberg has authored the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism, released in January 2008; The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, released in 20...
Go to Profile#271
Marta Harnecker
#8318
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Marta Harnecker was a Chilean journalist, author, psychologist, sociologist, and Marxist intellectual. She studied the analysis of labor movements and acted as an advisor to the government of Cuba, and worked with left-wing political movements within Latin America. She was active in the government of Salvador Allende between 1970 and 1973, and provided advice to Hugo Chávez between 2004 and 2011.
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Ersin Kalaycıoğlu
#7571
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Mahmut Ersin Kalaycıoğlu is a Turkish political scientist, professor of political sciences at Sabancı University and former president of Işık University, Istanbul . He is also a nephew of the well-known Turkish constitution professor, Tarık Zafer Tunaya.
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Donald Markwell
#4189
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Donald John Markwell is an Australian social scientist, who has been described as a "renowned Australian educational reformer". He was appointed Head of St Mark's College, Adelaide, from November 2019. He was Senior Adviser to the Leader of the Government in the Australian Senate from October 2015 to December 2017, and was previously Senior Adviser on Higher Education to the Australian Minister for Education.
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Bjørn Lomborg
#3021
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author and the president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is the former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist .
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Johan Olsen
#9214
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Johan Peder Olsen is a Norwegian political scientist, and professor emeritus in political science at the University of Bergen, known for his work on new institutionalism. Life and work Olsen obtained his MA in political science, with a minor in economics and political history, at the University of Oslo in 1967. In 1971 he obtained his PhD at the University of Bergen. He obtained an honorary doctorate from the Åbo Akademi, Finland in, 1988, from the University of Copenhagen in 1990. and from the Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2003.
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Burhan Ghalioun
#11469
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Burhan Ghalioun is a French-Syrian professor of sociology at the Université de Paris III Sorbonne University in Paris, and the first chairman of the Syrian opposition Transitional National Council . He was named chairman on 29 August 2011. His chairmanship was criticized for his perceived closeness to the Muslim Brotherhood, his early reluctance to arm opposition forces, and what opponents called the autocratic nature of his leadership. On 17 May 2012, feeling he had become an increasingly divisive figure for the council, Ghalioun resigned.
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Randall Schweller
#6860
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Randall L. Schweller is Professor of Political Science at the Ohio State University, where he has taught since 1994. He earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1993 and was as an Olin Fellow at Harvard University in 1993-94. His primary teaching and research interests include international security and international relations theory, and he is perhaps best known for his Balance of Interests theory, a revision to Kenneth Waltz's Balance of Power theory and Stephen Walt's Balance of Threat theory. His work on this subject includes: Randall Schweller, "Tripolarity and the Second World War", ...
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Anthony Cordesman
#9017
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is a national security analyst on a number of global conflicts. Career He earned his B.A. from the University of Chicago , his M.A. from the Fletcher School, Tufts University , and his Ph.D. from the University of London .
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David Frum
#3993
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
David Jeffrey Frum is a Canadian-American political commentator and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic as well as an MSNBC contributor. In 2003, Frum authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration. He has taken credit for the famous phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address.
Go to Profile#280
Charles Goodsell
#12601
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Charles True Goodsell is Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech's Center for Public Administration and Policy. He is perhaps best known for his volume The Case for Bureaucracy, now in its 4th edition. Goodsell is a co-author of the Blacksburg Manifesto, written with Gary Wamsley, Robert Bacher, Philip Kronenberg, John Rohr, Camilla Stivers, Orion White, and James Wolf – all of whom were at Virginia Tech during the 1980s. In 1994, Goodsell was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
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Donald L. Horowitz
#10468
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Donald L. Horowitz is James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science Emeritus at Duke Law School and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, United States. With law degrees from Syracuse and Harvard Universities, Donald Horowitz earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard. Most of his work has concerned ethnic conflict and accommodation in severely divided societies, based on a combination of extensive field research and wide knowledge of the phenomena in multiple countries, beginning with a long series of stays in Malaysia immediately after his Ph.D. studies. He has also pu...
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Taras Kuzio
#8705
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Taras Kuzio is a Professor of Political Science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy . His area of study is Russian and Ukrainian political, economic and security affairs. Education Taras Kuzio is of Ukrainian descent.
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Richard N. Haass
#9497
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Richard Nathan Haass is an American diplomat. He was president of the Council on Foreign Relations from July 2003 to June 2023, prior to which he was director of policy planning for the United States Department of State and a close advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell in the George W. Bush administration. In October 2022, Haass announced he would be departing from his position at CFR in June 2023. He was succeeded by former U.S. trade representative Michael Froman.
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Russell Kirk
#1284
Overall Influence
1918 - 1994 (76 years)
Russell Amos Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, and literary critic, known for his influence on 20th-century American conservatism. His 1953 book The Conservative Mind gave shape to the postwar conservative movement in the U.S. It traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, giving special importance to the ideas of Edmund Burke. Kirk was considered the chief proponent of traditionalist conservatism. He was also an accomplished author of Gothic and ghost story fiction. He is often considered one of the most signific...
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John Ikenberry
#7642
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gilford John Ikenberry is a theorist of international relations and United States foreign policy, and the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is known for his work on liberal International Relations theory, such as the books After Victory and Liberal Leviathan . He has been described as "the world's leading scholar of the liberal international order."
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Luce Irigaray
#201
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examined the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman , which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One , which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions can be read as a res...
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Lisa Anderson
#16443
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Lisa Anderson is an American political scientist and the former President of the American University in Cairo . Research and career A specialist on Middle Eastern and North African politics, Anderson served as the President of AUC from 2011 to 2016 and as Provost from 2008 to 2010. Prior to joining AUC, Anderson served as the James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations at Columbia University, the dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, the chair of the political science department and the director of the Middle East Institute. Previously, she was an assistan...
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Sadegh Zibakalam
#8205
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sadegh Zibakalam Mofrad is an Iranian academic, author and pundit described as reformist and neo-liberal. Zibakalam is a professor at University of Tehran and appears frequently on international news outlets including the BBC News and Al Jazeera. His books "How Did We Become What We Are? " and "An Introduction to Islamic Revolution" are among bestsellers and prominent books on Iranian contemporary politics.
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Barry Posen
#14301
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Barry Ross Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and the director of MIT's Security Studies Program. An expert in the field of security studies, he currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Security and Security Studies and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and served as a study group member for the Hart-Rudman Commission. Posen is a structural realist.
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Adil Najam
#2137
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Adil Najam is a Pakistani academic who also serves as the President of WWF, the Worldwide Fund for Nature , and is Dean Emerıtus and Professor of International Relations and Earth and Environment at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He was the founding Dean of the Pardee School from its creation in 2014 until 2022, when he was awarded the status of Dean Emeritus by Boston University. Previously he had served as vice-chancellor of the LUMS ın Lahore, Pakıstan.
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Jesús Huerta de Soto
#3816
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jesús Huerta de Soto Ballester is a Spanish economist of the Austrian School. He is a professor in the Department of Applied Economics at King Juan Carlos University of Madrid, Spain and a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute.
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William Wohlforth
#8112
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
William Curti Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor of Government in the Dartmouth College Department of Government, of which he was chair for three academic years . Wohlforth was Editor-in-chief of Security Studies from 2008 to 2011. He is linked to the Neoclassical realism school and known for his work on American unipolarity.
Go to Profile#293
Charles O. Jones
#17455
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Charles O. Jones is non-resident Senior Fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He is a graduate of the University of South Dakota and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Guggenheim fellow. He is a leading scholar of American politics. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow in the Governmental Studies Program at The Brookings Institution. Jones has written or edited 18 books and contributed over 100 articles and book chapters.
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Pratap Bhanu Mehta
#5594
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is an Indian academician. He was the president of the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank and was the Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University from July 2017 to July 2019.
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Norman Ornstein
#9685
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Norman Jay Ornstein is an American political scientist and an Emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute , a Washington, D.C., conservative think tank. He is the co-author of It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.
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Chester Crocker
#13413
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Chester Arthur Crocker is an American diplomat and scholar who served as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from June 9, 1981, to April 21, 1989, in the Reagan administration. Crocker, architect of the U.S. policy of "constructive engagement" towards Southern Africa including apartheid-era South Africa, is credited with setting the terms of Namibian independence.
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Samuel L. Popkin
#9149
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Samuel L. Popkin is an American political scientist who teaches at the University of California, San Diego. Popkin has played a role in the development of rational choice theory within political science. He is also noted for his work as a pollster.
Go to Profile#298
John Rohr
#8395
Overall Influence
1934 - 2011 (77 years)
John Anthony Rohr was an American political scientist who was Professor Emeritus at the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech. Rohr is particularly known as a leading scholar of the U.S. Constitution in relationship to civil servants and public administration.
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Robert Coldwell Wood
#8734
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Robert Coldwell Wood was an American political scientist, academic and government administrator, and professor of political science at MIT. From 1965 to 1969, Wood served as the Under Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and for two weeks as the Secretary at the end of the Johnson Administration.
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James Forman
#3957
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
James Forman was a prominent African-American leader in the civil rights movement. He was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee , the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. As the executive secretary of SNCC from 1961 to 1966, Forman played a significant role in the Freedom Rides, the Albany movement, the Birmingham campaign, and the Selma to Montgomery marches.
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