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.
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#4201
Willmoore Kendall
1909 - 1968 (59 years)
Willmoore Bohnert Kendall Jr. was an American conservative writer and a professor of political philosophy. Early life and education Kendall was born March 5, 1909, in Konawa, Oklahoma. His father, who was blind, was a Southern Methodist minister who preached in Konawa and other local towns. At age two, Kendall learned to read by playing with a typewriter. Graduating from high school at age 13, Kendall enrolled at Northwestern University before transferring to the University of Tulsa. In 1920, Kendall graduated from the University of Oklahoma at age 18. In 1927, under the pseudonym Alan Monk, Kendall wrote his first book, Baseball: How to Play It and How to Watch It.
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Sigmund Neumann
1904 - 1962 (58 years)
Sigmund Neumann was a German political scientist and sociologist. Born in Leipzig but emigrating first to London and then to the United States following the rise of Nazi Germany, Neumann was a leading proponent of the Second Thirty Years War-outlook on World War I and World War II and was awarded honorary doctorates from both Munich and Berlin Universities following his return to Germany in 1949. Before coming to the United States in 1934 to join the faculty of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, Neumann taught at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik and the London School of Economics, among other institutions.
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Nicholas J. Spykman
1893 - 1943 (50 years)
Nicholas John Spykman was an American political scientist who was Professor of International Relations at Yale University from 1928 until his death in 1943. He was one of the founders of the classical realist school in American foreign policy, transmitting Eastern European political thought to the United States.
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Arthur Jeffery
1892 - 1959 (67 years)
Arthur Jeffery was a Protestant Australian professor of Semitic languages from 1921 at the School of Oriental Studies in Cairo, and from 1938 until his death jointly at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Jeffery was awarded a D.Litt. from Edinburgh University in 1938. He is the author of extensive historical studies of Middle Eastern manuscripts. His important works include Materials for the History of the Text of the Qur'an: The Old Codices, which catalogs all surviving documented variants of the orthodox Quran text; and The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an,...
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J. J. L. Duyvendak
1889 - 1954 (65 years)
Jan Julius Lodewijk Duyvendak was a Dutch Sinologist and professor of Chinese at Leiden University. He is known for his translation of The Book of Lord Shang and his studies of the Dao De Jing. He was co-editor of the renowned sinology journal T'oung Pao with French scholar Paul Pelliot for several decades.
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Jacobus tenBroek
1911 - 1968 (57 years)
Jacobus tenBroek was an American disability rights activist, historian and political scientist. Early life TenBroek was born in Alberta, Canada in 1911. He became partially blind at the age of 7 due to an accident with a bow and arrow. His remaining eyesight deteriorated, and he was completely blind by age 14. His mother decided to move the family to California so tenBroek could attend a state school for the blind.
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William Edward Soothill
1861 - 1935 (74 years)
William Edward Soothill, was a Methodist missionary to China who later became Professor of Chinese at University College, Oxford, and a leading British sinologist. Life Born in Halifax, Yorkshire in January 1861, Soothill matriculated at London University. He entered the ministry of the United Methodist Free Church arriving in China in 1882 and spent 29 years as a missionary in Wenzhou, China. Another leading missionary there until 1909 was Grace Stott who led the China Inland Mission there.
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Edward Buehrig
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Edward Henry Buehrig was an American political scientist who spent most of his career at the Indiana University Bloomington. He was known as a leading authority on the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson.
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Hashimoto Mantaro
1932 - 1987 (55 years)
Hashimoto Mantarō was a Japanese sinologist and linguist who is best known for advocating research on language geography, linguistic typology, and how different areal features in the varieties of Chinese reflect contact with other language families.
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Erich Haenisch
1880 - 1966 (86 years)
Erich Haenisch was a German sinologist and first-degree cousin of politician Konrad Haenisch. He was the academic teacher of George Kennedy . During World War II., Haenisch was the only German sinologist who actively intervened with the Nazi government on behalf of his colleague Henri Maspero, who had been arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Buchenwald, since his son was a member of the resistance. Since Haenisch did not receive support by his German colleagues, he could not save Maspero, who died in Buchenwald on March 17, 1945.
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W. G. K. Duncan
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Walter George Keith Duncan , was an Australian academic and political scientist. Education Duncan was educated at Fort Street Boys' High School, Sydney, completing his education, BA and MA at the University of Sydney and PhD at the London School of Economics.
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Fritz Krenkow
1872 - 1953 (81 years)
Fritz Johann Heinrich Krenkow was a German orientalist. He was the uncle of D. H. Lawrence. Born in Germany, Krenkow moved to England aged 12. He earned a living with a hosiery firm in Leicester, and later acquired a reputation as an Arabic scholar. He later became a professor at the Aligarh Muslim University during 1929-30, and then at University of Bonn 1931-35.
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W. G. S. Adams
1874 - 1966 (92 years)
William George Stewart Adams was a Scottish political scientist and public servant who became principal of an Oxford College and a leader in the fields of voluntary service and rural regeneration. Background and education George Adams was born in Auchingramont Road, Hamilton, the younger son of John and Margaret Adams, by whom he was given "an intellectual and somewhat evangelistic upbringing". His father was Rector of St John's Grammar School and had founded Gilbertfield House School, both in Hamilton. His mother came from a Glasgow mercantile family and was a niece of the social activist...
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Paul Fauconnet
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Paul Fauconnet was a French sociologist who is best known as a contributor to the L'Année Sociologique. Fauconnet aggregated in philosophy in 1892 and earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1895. He also earned a further doctorate in law in 1920, although his interest in the law was purely scholarly and he never practiced as a lawyer. He became a professor at the faculty of letters in 1907 at the University of Toulouse and later chargé de cours at the faculty of letters in 1921 in Paris, obtaining a chair in 1932. His dissertation was entitled La responsabilité: Etude de sociologie . It adopt...
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H. A. R. Gibb
1895 - 1971 (76 years)
Sir Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb , known as H. A. R. Gibb, was a Scottish historian and Orientalist. Early life and education Gibb was born on Wednesday, 2 January 1895, in Alexandria, Egypt, to Alexander Crawford Gibb, the son of John Gibb of Gladstone, Renfrewshire, Scotland, and Jane Ann Gardner of Greenock, Scotland. His father died in 1897, following which his mother took up a teaching position in Alexandria. Hamilton returned to Scotland for his formal education at the age of five: first, four years of private tuition, after which he started at the Royal High School, Edinburgh in 1904, staying until 1912.
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Kingman Brewster Jr.
1919 - 1988 (69 years)
Kingman Brewster Jr. was an American educator, academic and diplomat. He served as the 17th President of Yale University and as United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Early life Brewster was born in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, the son of Florence Foster , a 1907 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wellesley College, and Kingman Brewster Sr., a 1906 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Amherst College and a 1911 graduate of the Harvard Law School. He was a direct lineal descendant of Elder William Brewster , the Mayflower passenger, Pilgrim colonist leader, and spiritual elder of the Plymouth Colony, through his son Jonathan Brewster.
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Walter Alexander Riddell
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Walter Alexander Riddell was a Canadian civil servant, diplomat, and academic. He was the Canadian Advisory Officer to the League of Nations from 1924 to 1937. Born in Stratford, Ontario to a single working parent, Riddell was the deputy minister of the Department of Labour for the Government of Ontario. From 1920 to 1925, he was the Canadian delegate to the International Labour Organization in Geneva. From 1924 to 1937, he was the Canadian Advisory Officer to the League of Nations. From 1940 to 1946, he was the Canadian High Commissioner to New Zealand. He later taught International Relation...
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Louis F. Budenz
1891 - 1972 (81 years)
Louis Francis Budens was an American activist and writer. He began as a labor activist and became a member of the Communist Party USA. In 1945, Budenz renounced Communism and became a vocal anti-Communist, appearing as an expert witness at governmental hearings and writing about his experiences.
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Jean Bruchési
1901 - 1979 (78 years)
Jean Bruchési, FRSC was a Canadian writer, historian, public servant, and diplomat. He was the president of the Royal Society of Canada for 1953–4. He was the son of Charles Bruchési, KC and the nephew of Paul Bruchési, Archbishop of Montreal.
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Cullen B. Gosnell
1893 - 1963 (70 years)
Cullen B. Gosnell was an American political scientist. He was the founder and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory University from 1933 to 1951. Early life Cullen Bryant Gosnell was born on December 14, 1893, near Spartanburg, South Carolina. He graduated from Wofford College with a bachelor's degree in 1916. He went on to receive a master's degree from Vanderbilt University in 1920 and a PhD from Princeton University in 1928.
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Thierry Braspenning-Balzacq
1900 - Present (126 years)
Thierry Balzacq is a French scholar specializing in IR Theory, security, and diplomatic studies. He is a professor of Political Science at Sciences Po Paris. He was previously awarded Francqui Research Chair , and held the Tocqueville Chair in IR at the University of Namur.
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Theodore Henry Robinson
1881 - 1964 (83 years)
Theodore Henry Robinson was a British biblical scholar who became professor of Semitic languages at University College, Cardiff. Life Robinson was born in Edenbridge, Kent, on 9 August 1881 to the Baptist minister W. Venis Robinson and his wife Emily Jane. After studying at St. John's College, Cambridge, Regent's Park Baptist College and Göttingen University he taught Hebrew and Syriac at Serampore College, Bengal.
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Enoch Crowder
1859 - 1932 (73 years)
Major General Enoch Herbert Crowder, USA was an American Army lawyer who served as the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army from 1911 to 1923. Crowder is most noted for implementing and administering the United States Selective Service Act of 1917, under which thousands of American men were drafted into military service during World War I.
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Henry Courtenay Fenn
1894 - 1978 (84 years)
Henry Courtenay Fenn, more commonly known as H. C. Fenn, was an American sinologist and architect of Yale University's Chinese language program. H. C. Fenn was the son of the Reverend Dr. Courtenay Hughes Fenn, missionary to China and compiler of The Five Thousand Dictionary, and his wife Alice Holstein May Fenn, and grew up in Peking. He married Constance Latimer Sargent on January 27, 1925. Fenn was active in the "Yale system" of Chinese grammar developed by himself, George Kennedy, Gardner Tewksbury, Wang Fangyu and others working in the Institute of Far Eastern Languages at Yale in the la...
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Geoffrey Ostergaard
1926 - 1990 (64 years)
Geoffrey Nielsen Ostergaard was a British political scientist best known for his work on the connections between Gandhism and anarchism, on the British co-operative movement, and on syndicalism and workers' control. His books included The Gentle Anarchists: A Study of the Sarvodaya Movement for Non-Violent Revolution in India , coauthored with Melville Currell, and Nonviolent Revolution in India , both dealing with the Sarvodaya movement. He spent the majority of his academic career at the University of Birmingham.
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Andrew W. Cordier
1901 - 1975 (74 years)
Andrew Wellington Cordier was a United Nations official and President of Columbia University. Early life Cordier was born on a farm near Canton, Ohio and attended high school in Hartville, Ohio where he became quarterback of the football team and valedictorian of his graduating class. He graduated in 1922 from Manchester University and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Medieval History at the University of Chicago in 1927. He married the former Dorothy Butterbaugh in 1924. He studied at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Switzerland in 1930–1931 where he made surveys of the situations in the Sudetenland, Danzig, and the Chaco War.
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Ernest B. Price
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Ernest Batson Price was an American diplomat, university professor, military officer, and businessman. He spent over twenty years in China and witnessed first-hand warlord power struggles, the growth of Japanese militarism, America's post-war diplomacy, China's civil war, and the profound social change that followed. As a result of this first-hand experience, Price was one of America's foremost authorities on Chinese language, culture, and politics from the early nineteen twenties through the mid nineteen fifties.
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Virgil Blum
1913 - 1990 (77 years)
Virgil Clarence Blum was an American Jesuit and professor of political science at Marquette University. Early life and education Virgil Clarence Blum was born on March 27, 1913, in Defiance, Iowa, one of twelve children of John and Elizabeth Blum. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1934 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1947. In 1938 Blum received a bachelor's degree in Latin and English from St. Stanislaus Seminary at Florissant, Missouri. In 1945 he earned a master's degree in history and political science from Saint Louis University. Blum returned to Saint Louis University in 1950 for...
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Mabel Palmer
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
Mabel Palmer also known as Mabel Atkinson in her first career, was a British-born, suffragist, journalist and lecturer. After her marriage, she began a second career as a South African educator and academic, using her married name. One of her most noted accomplishments came after her retirement from teaching, when she spearheaded a movement to provide university education for non-white students. After providing free courses in her home for a decade, she became director of the segregated courses offered by the Natal University College, serving from 1945 to 1955. After her second retirement, Pa...
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Arthur A. Ageton
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Arthur Ainslie Ageton was a naval officer, ambassador, writer, and writing teacher. He was the United States Ambassador to Paraguay from September 9, 1954, to April 10, 1957. He was also a rear admiral in the Navy.
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Julia Grace Wales
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Julia Grace Wales was a Canadian academic known for authoring the Wisconsin Plan, a proposal to set up a conference of intellectuals from neutral nations who would work to find a solution for the First World War.
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Harry Augustus Garfield
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Harry Augustus "Hal" Garfield was an American lawyer, academic, and public official. He was president of Williams College and supervised the United States Fuel Administration during World War I. He was a son of President James A. Garfield.
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Rufus B. von KleinSmid
1875 - 1964 (89 years)
Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid , also spelled Kleinsmidt, was the seventh president of the University of Arizona and the fifth president of the University of Southern California . Life and career Von KleinSmid started his academic career at DePauw University where he was a professor of education and psychology. He became USC's fifth president in 1921. A high priority of his administration was to expand professional training programs, and von KleinSmid also presided over a building program that added nine major structures to the university campus. By the end of his first decade in office, USC ha...
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Julieta Kirkwood
1936 - 1985 (49 years)
María Julieta Kirkwood Bañados was a Chilean sociologist, political scientist, university professor and feminist activist. She is considered one of the founders and impellers of the Chilean feminist movement in the 1980s. She is considered the forerunner of Gender studies in Chile.
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Homer Hulbert
1863 - 1949 (86 years)
Homer Bezaleel Hulbert was an American missionary, journalist, linguist, and Korean independence activist. Hulbert went by a variety of names in Korea, including Hŏ Halpo , Hŏ Hŭlpŏp , and Halpo .
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Carlo Cattaneo
1801 - 1869 (68 years)
Carlo Cattaneo was an Italian philosopher, writer, and activist, famous for his role in the Five Days of Milan in March 1848, when he led the city council during the rebellion. Early life and education Cattaneo was born in Milan on 15 June 1801. He was the son of Melchiorre Cattaneo, a goldsmith, and Maria Antonia Sangiorgi. After attending school in Milan he studied law at the University of Pavia, graduating in 1824.
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Patras Bokhari
1898 - 1958 (60 years)
Syed Ahmed Shah , commonly known as Patras Bokhari , was a Pakistani humorist, writer, broadcaster and diplomat who served as a Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations. Born in Peshawar, British India to a Kashmiri family, Shah studied at Edwardes Mission School in Peshawar and moved to Lahore where he studied English literature at the Government College. Shah moved to United Kingdom where he received his Tripos from the Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He returned to Lahore where he taught English at Government College in 1927. He became a prominent part of the Muslim intelligentsia in South Asia.
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Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
1864 - 1958 (94 years)
Edgar Algernon Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, , known as Lord Robert Cecil from 1868 to 1923, was a British lawyer, politician and diplomat. He was one of the architects of the League of Nations and a defender of it, whose service to the organisation saw him awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1937.
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William Blount
1749 - 1800 (51 years)
William Blount was an American politician, landowner and Founding Father who was one of the signers of the Constitution of the United States. He was a member of the North Carolina delegation at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and led the efforts for North Carolina to ratify the Constitution in 1789 at the Fayetteville Convention. He then served as the only governor of the Southwest Territory and played a leading role in helping the territory gain admission to the union as the state of Tennessee. He was selected as one of Tennessee's initial United States Senators in 1796, serving until ...
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Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi , was an Austrian-Japanese politician, philosopher, and count of Coudenhove-Kalergi. A pioneer of European integration, he served as the founding president of the Paneuropean Union for 49 years. His parents were Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, and Mitsuko Aoyama, the daughter of an oil merchant, antiques-dealer and major landowner in Tokyo. His childhood name in Japan was Eijiro Aoyama. Being a native Austrian-Hungarian citizen, he became a Czechoslovak citizen in 1919 and then took French citizenship from 1939...
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Frank Meyer
1909 - 1972 (63 years)
Frank Straus Meyer was an American philosopher and political activist best known for his theory of "fusionism" – a political philosophy that unites elements of libertarianism and traditionalism into a philosophical synthesis which is posited as the definition of modern American conservatism. Meyer's philosophy was presented in two books, primarily In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo and also in a collection of his essays, The Conservative Mainstream . Fusionism has been summed up by E. J. Dionne, Jr. as "utilizing libertarian means in a conservative society for traditionalist ends."
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Antonio Pigafetta
1492 - 1531 (39 years)
Antonio Pigafetta was a Venetian scholar and explorer. He joined the Spanish expedition to the Spice Islands led by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the world's first circumnavigation, and is best known for being the chronicler of the voyage. During the expedition, he served as Magellan's assistant until Magellan's death in the Philippine Islands, and kept an accurate journal, which later assisted him in translating the Cebuano language. It is the first recorded document concerning the language.
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Henry Jones Ford
1851 - 1925 (74 years)
Henry Jones Ford was an American political scientist, journalist, university professor, and government official. He served as president of the American Political Science Association. He was appointed by Woodrow Wilson as the Banking and Insurance Commissioner of New Jersey in 1912.
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John Smith
1580 - 1631 (51 years)
John Smith was an English soldier, explorer, colonial governor, admiral of New England, and author. He played an important role in the establishment of the colony at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America, in the early 17th century. He was a leader of the Virginia Colony between September 1608 and August 1609, and he led an exploration along the rivers of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay, during which he became the first English explorer to map the Chesapeake Bay area. Later, he explored and mapped the coast of New England. He was knighted for his services...
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Tommy Douglas
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Thomas Clement Douglas was a Canadian politician who served as the seventh premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961 and Leader of the New Democratic Party from 1961 to 1971. A Baptist minister, he was elected to the House of Commons of Canada in 1935 as a member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation . He left federal politics to become Leader of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and then the seventh Premier of Saskatchewan. His government introduced the continent's first single-payer, universal health care program.
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Mikhail Bakunin
1814 - 1876 (62 years)
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary anarchist. He is among the most influential figures of anarchism and a major figure in the revolutionary socialist, social anarchist, and collectivist anarchist traditions. Bakunin's prestige as a revolutionary also made him one of the most famous ideologues in Europe, gaining substantial influence among radicals throughout Russia and Europe.
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Sándor Kőrösi Csoma
1784 - 1842 (58 years)
Sándor Csoma de Kőrös was a Hungarian philologist and Orientalist, author of the first Tibetan–English dictionary and grammar book. He was called Phyi-glin-gi-grwa-pa in Tibetan, meaning "the foreign pupil", and was declared a bosatsu or bodhisattva by the Japanese in 1933. He was born in Kőrös, Grand Principality of Transylvania . His birth date is often given as 4 April, although this is actually his baptism day and the year of his birth is debated by some authors who put it at 1787 or 1788 rather than 1784. The Magyar ethnic group, the Székelys, to which he belonged believed that they were derived from a branch of Attila's Huns who had settled in Transylvania in the fifth century.
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Félicité de La Mennais
1782 - 1854 (72 years)
Félicité Robert de La Mennais was a French Catholic priest, philosopher and political theorist. He was one of the most influential intellectuals of Restoration France. Lamennais is considered the forerunner of liberal Catholicism and social Catholicism.
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Whitney Young
1921 - 1971 (50 years)
Whitney Moore Young Jr. was an American civil rights leader. Trained as a social worker, he spent most of his career working to end employment discrimination in the United States and turning the National Urban League from a relatively passive civil rights organization into one that aggressively worked for equitable access to socioeconomic opportunity for the historically disenfranchised. Young was influential in the United States federal government's War on Poverty in the 1960s.
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Nancy Cunard
1896 - 1965 (69 years)
Nancy Clara Cunard was a British writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class, and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon—who were among her lovers—as well as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuși, Langston Hughes, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian socialist leader V. K. Krishna Menon.
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