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 Political Science,
#4301
Gerhard von Mende
1904 - 1963 (59 years)
Gerhard von Mende was a Baltic German who was head of the Caucasus division at the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territory, or Ostministerium, in Nazi Germany. He was a scholar on Asiatic and Muslim minorities within the Soviet Union and was considered the pioneer of mobilising them as a fifth column against the Communists, while being one of their staunchest advocates within Nazi Germany and post-war West Germany. Following World War II, he established the Research Service Eastern Europe through financing by the West German foreign office, a company which replicated his activities ...
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Lydia Maria Child
1802 - 1880 (78 years)
Lydia Maria Child was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism. Her journals, both fiction and domestic manuals, reached wide audiences from the 1820s through the 1850s. At times she shocked her audience as she tried to take on issues of both male dominance and white supremacy in some of her stories.
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Edward Henry Palmer
1840 - 1882 (42 years)
Edward Henry Palmer , known as E. H. Palmer, was an English orientalist and explorer. Biography Youth and education Palmer was born in Green Street, Cambridge the son of a private schoolmaster. He was orphaned at an early age and brought up by an aunt. He was educated at The Perse School, and as a schoolboy showed the characteristic bent of his mind by picking up the Romani language and a great familiarity with the life of the Romani people. From school he was sent to London as a clerk in the city. Palmer disliked this life, and varied it by learning French and Italian, mainly by frequenting...
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David Jayne Hill
1850 - 1932 (82 years)
Rev. David Jayne Hill was an American academic, diplomat and author. He was president of Bucknell College and Rochester University, both in upstate New York. Early life The son of Baptist minister David T. Hill, David Jayne Hill was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on June 10, 1850. He graduated from Bucknell University in 1874 and was professor of rhetoric there from 1877 to 1879. In 1878 he received his Master of Arts degree, and he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He also undertook graduate studies at the University of Berlin and the University of Paris.
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Alva Belmont
1853 - 1933 (80 years)
Alva Erskine Belmont , known as Alva Vanderbilt from 1875 to 1896, was an American multi-millionaire socialite and women's suffrage activist. She was noted for her energy, intelligence, strong opinions, and willingness to challenge convention.
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Earl Browder
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Earl Russell Browder was an American politician, spy for the Soviet Union, communist activist and leader of the Communist Party USA . Browder was the General Secretary of the CPUSA during the 1930s and first half of the 1940s.
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Hermann Brockhaus
1806 - 1877 (71 years)
Hermann Brockhaus was a German Orientalist born in Amsterdam. He was a leading authority on Sanskrit and Persian languages. He was the son of publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus and brother-in-law to composer Richard Wagner. In 1870 he received a combined medal
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Emperor Jing of Han
188 BC - 141 BC (47 years)
Emperor Jing of Han , born Liu Qi , was the sixth emperor of the Han dynasty from 157 to 141 BC. His reign saw the limiting of the power of the feudal kings and princes which resulted in the Rebellion of the Seven States in 154 BC. Emperor Jing managed to crush the revolt and princes were thereafter denied rights to appoint ministers for their fiefs. This move helped to consolidate central power which paved the way for the long reign of his son Emperor Wu of Han.
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Arthur F. Wright
1913 - 1976 (63 years)
Arthur Frederick Wright was an American historian and sinologist. He was a professor of history at Yale University. He specialized in Chinese social and intellectual history of the pre-modern period.
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Francis Grose
1758 - 1814 (56 years)
Lieutenant-General Francis Grose was a British soldier who commanded the New South Wales Corps. As Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales he governed the colony from 1792 until 1794, in which he established military rule, abolished civil courts, and made generous land-grants to his officers. He failed to stamp out the practice of paying wages in alcoholic spirits, with consequent public drunkenness and corruption. Although he helped to improve living conditions to some degree, he was not viewed as a successful administrator.
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Robert Swinhoe
1836 - 1877 (41 years)
Robert Swinhoe FRS was an English diplomat and naturalist who worked as a Consul in Taiwan . He catalogued many Southeast Asian birds, and several, such as Swinhoe's pheasant, are named after him. Biography Swinhoe was born in colonial-era Kolkata where his father, who came from a Northumberland family, was a lawyer. There is no clear record of the date of his arrival in England, but it is known he attended the University of London, and in 1854 joined the China consular corps.
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Thomas Cooper
1759 - 1839 (80 years)
Thomas Cooper was an Anglo-American economist, college president and political philosopher. Cooper was described by Thomas Jefferson as "one of the ablest men in America" and by John Adams as "a learned ingenious scientific and talented madcap." Dumas Malone stated that "modern scientific progress would have been impossible without the freedom of the mind which he championed throughout life." His ideas were taken very seriously in his own time: there were substantial reviews of his writings, and some late eighteenth-century critics of materialism directed their arguments against Cooper, rath...
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Jan Rypka
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Jan Rypka, PhDr., Dr.Sc. was a prominent Czech orientalist, translator, professor of Iranology and Turkology at Charles University, Prague. Jan Rypka was a participant in Ferdowsi Millenary Celebration in Tehran in 1934.
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Horace Walpole
1717 - 1797 (80 years)
Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford , better known as Horace Walpole, was an English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whig politician. He had Strawberry Hill House built in Twickenham, southwest London, reviving the Gothic style some decades before his Victorian successors. His literary reputation rests on the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto , and his Letters, which are of significant social and political interest. They have been published by Yale University Press in 48 volumes. In 2017, a volume of Walpole's selected letters was published.
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Emil Rödiger
1801 - 1874 (73 years)
Emil Rödiger was a German orientalist. He studied philosophy and theology at the University of Halle, where in 1830, he became an associate professor of Oriental languages, followed by a full professorship in 1835. He moved to Berlin in 1860, and remained there for the rest of his life.
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Hugh Gladney Grant
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Hugh Gladney Grant was an American diplomat from the state of Alabama. Grant was educated at Samford University in Homewood, Alabama. He later taught at Auburn University, , before entering government service.
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Werner Krauss
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
Werner Krauss was a German university professor . During the 1940s he became a political activist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. In 1943 he was found guilty of preparing to commit high treason and condemned to death. Following the intervention of influential fellow-intellectuals the sentence was commuted to a five-year prison term in 1944.
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Gustav Weil
1808 - 1889 (81 years)
Gustav Weil was a German orientalist. Biography Weil was born in Sulzburg, then part of the Grand Duchy of Baden. Being destined for the rabbinate, he was taught Hebrew, as well as German and French; and he received instruction in Latin from the minister of his native town. At the age of twelve he went to Metz, where his grandfather was rabbi, to study the Talmud. For this, however, he developed very little taste, and he abandoned his original intention of entering upon a theological career. In 1828 he entered the University of Heidelberg, devoting himself to the study of philology and history; at the same time he studied Arabic under Umbreit.
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James D. Theberge
1930 - 1988 (58 years)
James Daniel Theberge was a United States ambassador to Nicaragua and Chile . Early life and education He was born in Oceanside, New York, and received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1952, an M.A. from Oxford University in 1960, and did graduate work at Heidelberg University. He later received an M.P.A. from Harvard University in 1965. He was a Littauer Fellow at Harvard.
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William Robertson Smith
1846 - 1894 (48 years)
William Robertson Smith was a Scottish orientalist, Old Testament scholar, professor of divinity, and minister of the Free Church of Scotland. He was an editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica and contributor to the Encyclopaedia Biblica. He is also known for his book Religion of the Semites, which is considered a foundational text in the comparative study of religion.
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Morris Jastrow Jr.
1861 - 1921 (60 years)
Morris Jastrow Jr. was a Polish-born American orientalist and librarian associated with the University of Pennsylvania. Biography He was born in Warsaw in Congress Poland, and came to Philadelphia in 1866 when his father, Marcus Jastrow, a renowned Talmudic scholar, accepted a position as Rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Shalom. He was educated in the schools of Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1881. His original intention was to become a rabbi. For this purpose, he carried on theological studies at the first modern rabbinical seminary in Central Europe, the new...
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George H. Jackson
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
George H. Jackson was an American lawyer, consul, and political activist. He is sometimes confused with George Henry Jackson , who was elected to the Ohio State House of Representatives in 1892 and who was appointed treasurer at the founding meeting of the Niagara Movement.
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Carl Ferdinand Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt
1861 - 1938 (77 years)
Carl Ferdinand Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt was a German orientalist and historian. He specialized in Urartian research, and was co-author of Corpus Inscriptionum Chaldicarum, a corpus of Urartian inscriptions.
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Arthur von Rosthorn
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
Arthur von Rosthorn was an Austrian diplomat and sinologist. He obtained his education in Vienna and Oxford, where he was a student of sinologist James Legge. From 1883 to 1893 he was associated with the Seezollverwaltung in China. In 1895 he received his doctorate from the University of Leipzig, and afterwards worked for the Austrian diplomatic service; serving as a legation secretary and counselor in China, and later as an envoy in Tehran and Beijing . In 1922 he was named an honorary professor at the University of Vienna, where up until 1939, he taught classes in Chinese language, litera...
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Edmund Castell
1606 - 1685 (79 years)
Edmund Castell was an English orientalist. He was born at Tadlow, in Cambridgeshire. At the age of fifteen he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, gaining his BA in 1624-5 and his MA in 1628. Appointed Professor of Arabic in 1666, with the full title 'Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic'. He moved to St John's in 1671, because of the valuable library there. His great work, the Lexicon Heptaglotton Hebraicum, Chaldaicum, Syriacum, Samaritanum, Aethiopicum, Arabicum, et Persicum , took him eighteen years to complete, working from sixteen to eighteen hours a day. He employed fourteen assistant...
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Edgar Lane
1923 - 1964 (41 years)
Edgar Lane was a professor of political science at the University of California Santa Barbara. He was the author and editor of many scholarly articles, book reviews, and a book on lobbying reform. He made substantial contributions to the regulation of lobbying by assisting the House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities .
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Henri Massé
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Henri Massé was a 20th-century French orientalist. He was first professor of Arabic and Persian literatures at the faculté des lettres d'Alger, then professor of Persian language at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes of Paris , of which he was administrator from 1948 to 1958 and a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
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Samuel Beal
1825 - 1889 (64 years)
Samuel Beal was an Oriental scholar, and the first Englishman to translate directly from the Chinese the early records of Buddhism, thus illuminating Indian history. Life and work Samuel Beal was born in Devonport, Devon, and went to Kingswood School and Devonport. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1847. He was the son of a Wesleyan minister, reverend William Beal; and brother of William Beal and Philip Beal who survived a shipwreck in Kenn Reef.
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Hermann von der Hardt
1660 - 1746 (86 years)
Hermann von der Hardt was a German historian and orientalist. He was born at Melle, in Westphalia . He studied oriental languages at the universities of Jena and Leipzig, and in 1690 he was called to the chair of oriental languages at Helmstedt. He resigned his position in 1727, but lived at Helmstedt until his death.
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William C. F. Robinson
1834 - 1897 (63 years)
Sir William Cleaver Francis Robinson was an Irish colonial administrator and musical composer, who wrote several well-known songs. He was born in County Westmeath, Ireland, and was educated at home and at the Royal Naval School. He joined the Colonial Office service in 1858 and became the president of Montserrat in 1862.
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Ambrose Burnside
1824 - 1881 (57 years)
Ambrose Everett Burnside was an American army officer and politician who became a senior Union general in the Civil War and three-time Governor of Rhode Island, as well as being a successful inventor and industrialist.
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Gustav Haloun
1898 - 1951 (53 years)
Gustav Haloun was a Czech sinologist. He studied in Vienna under Arthur von Rosthorn and in Leipzig under August Conrady from where he received his Dr. phil. in 1923. He obtained habilitation at Charles University in Prague where he lectured in 1926-1927. Afterwards he taught at Halle University , and Göttingen University , before becoming Chair of Chinese Language and History at Cambridge University, succeeding Arthur Christopher Moule and preceding Edwin G. Pulleyblank in that position.
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William O. Hall
1914 - 1977 (63 years)
William Oscar Hall was the U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia from 1967 to 1971, during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie I. Biography William O. Hall was born May 22, 1914, in Roswell, New Mexico. He moved with his family to Prineville, Oregon, when he was seven years old. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Oregon in 1936, pursued graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and served in the U.S. Foreign Service thereafter. He worked in the consular service, the United Nations, and the Agency for International Development.
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Pierre Beaumarchais
1732 - 1799 (67 years)
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was a French polymath. At various times in his life, he was a watchmaker, inventor, playwright, musician, diplomat, spy, publisher, horticulturist, arms dealer, satirist, financier and revolutionary .
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Spenser Wilkinson
1853 - 1937 (84 years)
Henry Spenser Wilkinson was the first Chichele Professor of Military History at Oxford University. While he was an English writer known primarily for his work on military subjects, he had wide interests. Earlier in his career he was the drama critic for London's Morning Post.
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Harold W. Chase
1922 - 1982 (60 years)
Harold William Chase was an American professor of political science. He was also a major general in the United States Marine Corps Reserve who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs in the administration of President Jimmy Carter.
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William Miller Collier
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
William Miller Collier was United States Ambassador to Spain from 1905 to 1909, the president of George Washington University from 1918 to 1921, and United States Ambassador to Chile from 1921 to 1928.
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Pier Paolo Vergerio
1498 - 1565 (67 years)
Pier Paolo Vergerio , the Younger, was an Italian papal nuncio and later Protestant reformer. Life He was born at Capodistria , Istria, then part of the Venetian Republic and studied jurisprudence in Padua, where he delivered lectures in 1522. He also practiced law in Verona, Padua, and Venice. In 1526, he married Diana Contarini, whose early death was at least a partial cause of his entering upon an ecclesiastical career.
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Patrick Doyle
1892 - 1921 (29 years)
Patrick Doyle was one of six men hanged in Mountjoy Prison on the morning of 14 March 1921. He was aged 31 and lived at St. Mary's Place, Dublin. He was one of The Forgotten Ten. Background Doyle was involved in an arms raid on Collinstown Aerodrome in 1919. Together with Frank Flood, he was involved in planning several attempts to free Kevin Barry from Mountjoy in the days before Barry's own execution in November 1920. Flood would later be hanged on the same morning as Doyle.
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W. Averell Harriman
1891 - 1986 (95 years)
William Averell Harriman , better known as Averell Harriman, was an American Democratic politician, businessman, and diplomat. The son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman, he served as Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman, and later as the 48th governor of New York. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952 and 1956, as well as a core member of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".
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Albert Terrien de Lacouperie
1844 - 1894 (50 years)
Albert Étienne Jean-Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie was a French orientalist, specialising in comparative philology. He published a number of books on early Asian and Middle-Eastern languages, initially in French and then in English. Lacouperie is best known for his studies of the Yi Ching and his argument, known as Sino-Babylonianism, that the important elements of ancient civilization in ancient China came from Mesopotamia and that there were resemblances between Chinese characters and Akkadian hieroglyphics.
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Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten
1792 - 1860 (68 years)
Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten was a German orientalist born in Altenkirchen on the island of Rügen. He was the son of ecclesiastic Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten . He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Greifswald, and from 1812 studied Oriental languages in Paris. In 1815 he became an adjunct to the theological and philosophical faculty in Greifswald. From 1817 to 1824 he was a professor of Oriental languages at the University of Jena, and afterwards a professor at Greifswald.
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Allan Pinkerton
1819 - 1884 (65 years)
Allan J. Pinkerton was a Scottish-American cooper, abolitionist, detective, and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in the United States and his claim to have foiled a plot in 1861 to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, he provided the Union Army – specifically General George B. McClellan of the Army of the Potomac – with military intelligence, including extremely inaccurate enemy troop strength numbers. After the war, his agents played a significant role as strikebreakers – in particular during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 ...
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Salomon Schweigger
1551 - 1622 (71 years)
Salomon Schweigger was a German Lutheran theologian, minister, anthropologist and orientalist of the 16th century. He provided a valuable insight during his travels in the Balkans, Constantinople and the Middle East, and published a famous travel book of his exploits. He also published the first German language translation of the Qur'an.
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Emily Newell Blair
1877 - 1951 (74 years)
Emily Newell Blair was an American writer, suffragist, feminist, national Democratic Party political leader, and a founder of the League of Women Voters. Biography Early life and ancestors Emily Jane Newell Blair was born in Joplin, Jasper County, Missouri, on January 9, 1877, and died August 3, 1951, in Alexandra, Arlington County, Virginia. She was a daughter of James Patton Newell and Anna Cynthia Gray.
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Max Wexler
1870 - 1917 (47 years)
Max Wexler was a Romanian socialist activist and journalist, regarded as one of the main Marxist theorist of the early Romanian workers' movement. Active in the first Romanian socialist party, the Romanian Social Democratic Workers' Party, he became dissatisfied with the party's passivity and its failure to openly support political rights for the Romanian Jews, initiating a separate Jewish socialist group. Following the party's demise, he was one of the main activists for the revival of the socialist movement in Iaşi, introducing to Marxism many future leaders of the Romanian socialist parties.
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John Dowson
1820 - 1881 (61 years)
John Dowson M.R.A.S. was a British indologist. A noted scholar of Hinduism, he taught in India for much of his life. His book Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology remains one of the most comprehensive and authoritative works on the topic.
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William Rosecrans
1819 - 1898 (79 years)
William Starke Rosecrans was an American inventor, coal-oil company executive, diplomat, politician, and U.S. Army officer. He gained fame for his role as a Union general during the American Civil War. He was the victor at prominent Western Theater battles, but his military career was effectively ended following his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863.
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Pausanias the Regent
Pausanias was a Spartan regent and a general. In 479 BC, as a leader of the Hellenic League's combined land forces, he won a pivotal victory against the Achaemenid Empire in the Battle of Plataea. Despite his role in ending the Second Persian invasion of Greece, Pausanias subsequently fell under suspicion of conspiring with the Persian king Xerxes I. After an interval of repeated arrests and debates about his guilt, he was starved to death by his fellow Spartans in 477 BC. What is known of his life is largely according to Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Diodorus' Bibliotheca hi...
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John Gagnier
1670 - 1740 (70 years)
John Gagnier was a French orientalist, resident for much of his life in England. Biography Gagnier was born in Paris about 1670, and educated at the College of Navarre. His tutor, Le Bossu, showed him a copy of Brian Walton's 'Polyglott Bible'. This led him to master Hebrew and Arabic. After taking orders he was made a canon regular of the Abbey of St. Genevieve. Finding the life irksome, he retired to England, and ultimately became an Anglican clergyman.
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