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,
#4301
Luther Gulick
1892 - 1993 (101 years)
Luther Halsey Gulick was an American political scientist, Eaton Professor of Municipal Science and Administration at Columbia University, and Director of its Institute of Public Administration, known as an expert on public administration.
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Eric Voegelin
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Eric Voegelin was a German-American political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna, where he became an associate professor of political science in the law faculty. In 1938, he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna. They emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
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Lev Kamenev
1883 - 1936 (53 years)
Lev Borisovich Kamenev was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. Born in Moscow to parents who were both involved in revolutionary politics, Kamenev attended Imperial Moscow University before becoming a revolutionary himself, joining the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901 and was active in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Tiflis . He participated in the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. Relocating abroad in 1908, Kamenev became an early member of the Bolsheviks and a close associate of the exiled Vladimir Lenin. In 1914, he was arrested upon returning to St. Petersburg and exiled to Siberia.
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François Guizot
1787 - 1874 (87 years)
François Pierre Guillaume Guizot was a French historian, orator, and statesman. Guizot was a dominant figure in French politics prior to the Revolution of 1848. A conservative liberal who opposed the attempt by King Charles X to usurp legislative power, he worked to sustain a constitutional monarchy following the July Revolution of 1830. He then served the "citizen king" Louis Philippe, as Minister of Education, 1832–37, ambassador to London, Foreign Minister 1840–1847, and finally Prime Minister of France from 19 September 1847 to 23 February 1848.
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Charles Anderson Dana
1819 - 1897 (78 years)
Charles Anderson Dana was an American journalist, author, and senior government official. He was a top aide to Horace Greeley as the managing editor of the powerful Republican newspaper New-York Tribune until 1862. During the American Civil War, he served as Assistant Secretary of War, playing especially the role of the liaison between the War Department and General Ulysses S. Grant. In 1868 he became the editor and part-owner of The New York Sun. He at first appealed to working class Democrats but after 1890 became a champion of business-oriented conservatism. Dana was an avid art collector ...
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Klemens von Metternich
1773 - 1859 (86 years)
Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, Prince of Metternich-Winneburg zu Beilstein , known as Klemens von Metternich or Prince Metternich, was a conservative Austrian statesman and diplomat who was at the center of the European balance of power known as the Concert of Europe for three decades as the Austrian Empire's foreign minister from 1809 and Chancellor from 1821 until the liberal Revolutions of 1848 forced his resignation.
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Ella Baker
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Ella Josephine Baker was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, and Bob Moses, as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee .
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Abbie Hoffman
1936 - 1989 (53 years)
Abbot Howard Hoffman was an American political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party and was a member of the Chicago Seven. He was also a leading proponent of the Flower Power movement.
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Augusto César Sandino
1895 - 1934 (39 years)
Augusto C. Sandino , full name Augusto Nicolás Calderón Sandino, was a Nicaraguan revolutionary and leader of a rebellion between 1927 and 1933 against the United States occupation of Nicaragua. Despite being referred to as a "bandit" by the United States government, his exploits made him a hero throughout much of Latin America, where he became a symbol of resistance to American imperialism. Sandino drew units of the United States Marine Corps into an undeclared guerrilla war. The United States troops withdrew from the country in 1933 after overseeing the election and inauguration of President Juan Bautista Sacasa, who had returned from exile.
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Kwame Nkrumah
1909 - 1972 (63 years)
Francis Kwame Nkrumah was a Ghanaian politician, political theorist, and revolutionary. He was the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana, having led the Gold Coast to independence from Britain in 1957. An influential advocate of Pan-Africanism, Nkrumah was a founding member of the Organization of African Unity and winner of the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union in 1962.
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Joseph Gallieni
1849 - 1916 (67 years)
Joseph Simon Gallieni was a French military officer, active for most of his career as a military commander and administrator in the French colonies where he wrote several books on colonial affairs. Gallieni is infamous in Madagascar as the French military leader who exiled Queen Ranavalona III and abolished the 350-year-old monarchy on the island.
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Daniel O'Connell
1775 - 1847 (72 years)
Daniel O'Connell , hailed in his time as The Liberator, was the acknowledged political leader of Ireland's Roman Catholic majority in the first half of the 19th century. His mobilisation of Catholic Ireland, down to the poorest class of tenant farmers, secured the final instalment of Catholic emancipation in 1829 and allowed him to take a seat in the United Kingdom Parliament to which he had been twice elected.
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Sylvia Pankhurst
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was an English feminist and socialist activist and writer. Following encounters with women-led labour activism in the United States, she worked to organise working-class women in London's East End. This, together with her refusal in 1914 to enter into a wartime political truce with the government, caused her to break with the suffragette leadership of her mother and sister, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Pankhurst welcomed the Russian Revolution and consulted in Moscow with Lenin. But as advocate of workers' control, she rejected the Leninist party line and criti...
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Folke Bernadotte
1895 - 1948 (53 years)
Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg was a Swedish nobleman and diplomat. In World War II he negotiated the release of about 31,000 prisoners from German concentration camps, including 450 Danish Jews from the Theresienstadt camp. They were released on 14 April 1945. In 1945 he received a German surrender offer from Heinrich Himmler, though the offer was ultimately rejected.
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Clara Zetkin
1857 - 1933 (76 years)
Clara Zetkin was a German Marxist theorist, communist activist, and advocate for women's rights. Until 1917, she was active in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. She then joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and its far-left wing, the Spartacist League, which later became the Communist Party of Germany . She represented that party in the Reichstag during the Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1933.
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Morarji Desai
1896 - 1995 (99 years)
Morarji Ranchhodji Desai was an Indian independence activist and politician who served as the 4th Prime Minister of India between 1977 and 1979 leading the government formed by the Janata Party. During his long career in politics, he held many important posts in government such as Chief Minister of Bombay State, Home Minister, Finance Minister and 2nd Deputy Prime Minister of India.
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Fedor von Bock
1880 - 1945 (65 years)
Moritz Albrecht Franz Friedrich Fedor von Bock was a German Generalfeldmarschall who served in the German Army during the Second World War. Bock served as the commander of Army Group North during the Invasion of Poland in 1939, commander of Army Group B during the Invasion of France in 1940, and later as the commander of Army Group Center during the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941; his final command was that of Army Group South in 1942.
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Kang Youwei
1858 - 1927 (69 years)
Kang Youwei was a prominent political thinker and reformer in China of the late Qing dynasty. His increasing closeness to and influence over the young Guangxu Emperor sparked conflict between the emperor and his adoptive mother, the regent Empress Dowager Cixi. His ideas were influential in the abortive Hundred Days' Reform. Following the coup by Cixi that ended the reform, Kang was forced to flee. He continued to advocate for a Chinese constitutional monarchy after the founding of the Republic of China.
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Michael Harrington
1928 - 1989 (61 years)
Edward Michael Harrington Jr. was an American democratic socialist. As a writer, he was best known as the author of The Other America. Harrington was also a political activist, theorist, professor of political science, and radio commentator. He was a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and its most influential early leader.
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James Burnham
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
James Burnham was an American philosopher and political theorist. He chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy; his first book was An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis . Burnham became a prominent Trotskyist activist in the 1930s. He later rejected Marxism and became an even more influential theorist of the political right as a leader of the American conservative movement. His book The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, speculated on the future of capitalism. Burnham was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics.
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Rufus King
1755 - 1827 (72 years)
Rufus King was an American Founding Father, lawyer, politician, and diplomat. He was a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress and the Philadelphia Convention and was one of the signers of the United States Constitution in 1787. After formation of the new Congress, he represented New York in the United States Senate. He emerged as a leading member of the Federalist Party and was the party's last presidential nominee during the 1816 presidential election.
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Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer
1841 - 1917 (76 years)
Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer, was a British statesman, diplomat and colonial administrator. He served as the British controller-general in Egypt during 1879, part of the international control which oversaw Egyptian finances after the Egyptian bankruptcy of 1876. He later became the agent and consul-general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907 during the British occupation, prompted by the Urabi revolt. This position gave Baring de facto control over Egyptian finances and governance.
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Francisco de Paula Santander
1792 - 1840 (48 years)
Francisco José de Paula Santander y Omaña , was a Colombian military and political leader during the 1810–1819 independence war of the United Provinces of New Granada . He was the acting President of Gran Colombia between 1819 and 1826, and later elected by Congress as the President of the Republic of New Granada between 1832 and 1837. Santander came to be known as "The Man of the Laws" .
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John Bright
1811 - 1889 (78 years)
John Bright was a British Radical and Liberal statesman, one of the greatest orators of his generation and a promoter of free trade policies. A Quaker, Bright is most famous for battling the Corn Laws. In partnership with Richard Cobden, he founded the Anti-Corn Law League, aimed at abolishing the Corn Laws, which raised food prices and protected landowners' interests by levying taxes on imported wheat. The Corn Laws were repealed in 1846. Bright also worked with Cobden in another free trade initiative, the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty of 1860, promoting closer interdependence between Great Britain and the Second French Empire.
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Midhat Pasha
1822 - 1883 (61 years)
Ahmed Şefik Midhat Pasha was an Ottoman politician, reformist and statesman. He was the author of the Constitution of the Ottoman Empire. Midhat was born in Istanbul and educated from a private . In July 1872, he was appointed grand vizier by Abdulaziz , though was removed in August. During the First Constitutional Era, in 1876, he co-founded the Ottoman Parliament. Midhat was noted as a kingmaker and leading Ottoman democrat. He was part of a governing elite which recognized the crisis the Empire was in and considered reform to be a dire need. Midhat was reportedly killed in al-Ta'if.
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Washington Irving
1783 - 1859 (76 years)
Washington Irving was an American short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He wrote the short stories "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" , both of which appear in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of Oliver Goldsmith, Muhammad, and George Washington, as well as several histories of 15th-century Spain that deal with subjects such as the Alhambra, Christopher Columbus, and the Moors. Irving served as American ambassador to Spain in the 1840s.
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Joseph de Maistre
1753 - 1821 (68 years)
Joseph Marie, comte de Maistre was a Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer, and diplomat who advocated social hierarchy and monarchy in the period immediately following the French Revolution. Despite his close personal and intellectual ties with France, Maistre was throughout his life a subject of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which he served as a member of the Savoy Senate , ambassador to Russia , and minister of state to the court in Turin .
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Henry Cabot Lodge
1850 - 1924 (74 years)
Henry Cabot Lodge was an American Republican politician, historian, and statesman from Massachusetts. He served in the United States Senate from 1893 to 1924 and is best known for his positions on foreign policy. His successful crusade against Woodrow Wilson's Treaty of Versailles ensured that the United States never joined the League of Nations and his reservations against that treaty influenced the structure of the modern United Nations.
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Tenskwatawa
1775 - 1836 (61 years)
Tenskwatawa was a Native American religious and political leader of the Shawnee tribe, known as the Prophet or the Shawnee Prophet. He was a younger brother of Tecumseh, a leader of the Shawnee. In his early years Tenskwatawa was given the name Lalawethika , but he changed it around 1805 and transformed himself from a hapless, alcoholic youth into an influential spiritual leader. Tenskwatawa denounced the Americans, calling them the offspring of the Evil Spirit, and led a purification movement that promoted unity among the Indigenous peoples of North America, rejected acculturation to the A...
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Sojourner Truth
1798 - 1883 (85 years)
Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women's rights, and alcohol temperance. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
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Mykhailo Hrushevsky
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
Mykhailo Serhiiovych Hrushevsky was a Ukrainian academician, politician, historian and statesman who was one of the most important figures of the Ukrainian national revival of the early 20th century. Hrushevsky is often considered the country's greatest modern historian, the foremost organiser of scholarship, the leader of the pre-revolution Ukrainian national movement, the head of the Central Rada , and a leading cultural figure in the Ukrainian SSR during the 1920s.
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Nicos Poulantzas
1936 - 1979 (43 years)
Nicos Poulantzas was a Greek-French Marxist political sociologist and philosopher. In the 1970s, Poulantzas was known, along with Louis Althusser, as a leading structural Marxist; while at first a Leninist, he eventually became a proponent of the "democratic road to socialism." He is best known for his theoretical work on the state, but he also offered Marxist contributions to the analysis of fascism, social class in the contemporary world, and the collapse of dictatorships in Southern Europe in the 1970s, such as Francisco Franco's rule in Spain, António de Oliveira Salazar's in Portugal, an...
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Lucy Stone
1818 - 1893 (75 years)
Lucy Stone was an American orator, abolitionist and suffragist who was a vocal advocate for and organizer promoting rights for women. In 1847, Stone became the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She spoke out for women's rights and against slavery. Stone was known for using her birth name after marriage, contrary to the custom of women taking their husband's surname.
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Vidkun Quisling
1887 - 1945 (58 years)
Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling was a Norwegian military officer, politician and Nazi collaborator who nominally headed the government of Norway during the country's occupation by Nazi Germany during World War II.
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Lucretia Mott
1793 - 1880 (87 years)
Lucretia Mott was an American Quaker, abolitionist, women's rights activist, and social reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position of women in society when she was amongst the women excluded from the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. In 1848, she was invited by Jane Hunt to a meeting that led to the first public gathering about women's rights, the Seneca Falls Convention, during which the Declaration of Sentiments was written.
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Eleanor Roosevelt
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She was the first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms in office, making her the longest-serving first lady of the United States. Through her travels, public engagement, and advocacy, she largely redefined the role of First Lady. Roosevelt then served as a United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952, and in 1948 she was given a standing ovation by the assembly upon their adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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Christian Rakovsky
1873 - 1941 (68 years)
Christian Georgievich Rakovsky was a Bulgarian-born socialist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and Soviet diplomat and statesman; he was also noted as a journalist, physician, and essayist. Rakovsky's political career took him throughout the Balkans and into France and Imperial Russia; for part of his life, he was also a Romanian citizen.
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Frank Johnson Goodnow
1859 - 1939 (80 years)
Frank Johnson Goodnow was an American educator and legal scholar. He was the first president of the American Political Science Association. He was an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
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Pedro Albizu Campos
1891 - 1965 (74 years)
Pedro Albizu Campos was a Puerto Rican attorney and politician, and a leading figure in the Puerto Rican independence movement. He was the president and spokesperson of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico from 1930 until his death. He led the nationalist revolts of October 1950 against the United States government in Puerto Rico. Albizu Campos spent a total of twenty-six years in prison at various times for his Puerto Rican independence activities.
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Timothy Pickering
1745 - 1829 (84 years)
Timothy Pickering was the third United States Secretary of State under Presidents George Washington and John Adams. He also represented Massachusetts in both houses of Congress as a member of the Federalist Party. In 1795, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.
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Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava
1826 - 1902 (76 years)
Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, , was a British public servant and prominent member of Victorian society. In his youth he was a popular figure in the court of Queen Victoria, and became well known to the public after publishing a best-selling account of his travels in the North Atlantic.
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Graham Martin
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Graham Anderson Martin was an American diplomat. He was the ambassador to Thailand and as U.S. representative to SEATO from 1963 to 1967, ambassador to Italy from 1969 to 1973 and the last United States Ambassador to South Vietnam from 1973 until his evacuation during the Fall of Saigon in 1975.
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John Hay
1838 - 1905 (67 years)
John Milton Hay was an American statesman and official whose career in government stretched over almost half a century. Beginning as a private secretary and an assistant for Abraham Lincoln, he became a diplomat. He served as United States Secretary of State under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay was also a biographer of Lincoln, and wrote poetry and other literature throughout his life.
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George Bancroft
1800 - 1891 (91 years)
George Bancroft was an American historian, statesman and Democratic politician who was prominent in promoting secondary education both in his home state of Massachusetts and at the national and international levels.
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Dean Acheson
1893 - 1971 (78 years)
Dean Gooderham Acheson was an American statesman and lawyer. As the 51st U.S. Secretary of State, he set the foreign policy of the Harry S. Truman administration from 1949 to 1953. He was also Truman's main foreign policy advisor from 1945 to 1947, especially regarding the Cold War. Acheson helped design the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He was in private law practice from July 1947 to December 1948. After 1949 Acheson came under partisan political attack from Republicans led by Senator Joseph McCarthy over Truman's policy toward the...
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Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend
1674 - 1738 (64 years)
Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, was an English Whig statesman. He served for a decade as Secretary of State for the Northern Department from 1714 to 1717 and again from 1721 to 1730. He directed British foreign policy in close collaboration with his brother-in-law, prime minister Robert Walpole. He was often known as Turnip Townshend because of his strong interest in farming turnips and his role in the British Agricultural Revolution.
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Whitelaw Reid
1837 - 1912 (75 years)
Whitelaw Reid was an American politician and newspaper editor, as well as the author of Ohio in the War, a popular work of history. After assisting Horace Greeley as editor of the New-York Tribune, Reid purchased the paper after Greeley's death in late 1872 and controlled it until his own death. The circulation grew to about 60,000 a day, but the weekly edition became less important. He invested heavily in new technology, such as the Hoe rotary printing press and the linotype machine, but bitterly fought against the unionized workers for control of his shop.
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Moses Gaster
1856 - 1939 (83 years)
Moses Gaster was a Romanian, later British scholar, the Hakham of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish congregation, London, and a Hebrew and Romanian linguist. Moses Gaster was an active Zionist in Romania as well as in England, where in 1899 he helped establish the English Zionist Federation.
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Rebecca West
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield , known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph and The New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon , on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder , her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason , later The New Meaning of Treason , a study of th...
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Shūmei Ōkawa
1886 - 1957 (71 years)
Shūmei Ōkawa was a Japanese nationalist and Pan-Asianist writer, known for his publications on Japanese history, philosophy of religion, Indian philosophy, and colonialism. Background Ōkawa was born in Sakata, Yamagata, Japan in 1886. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1911, where he had studied Vedic literature and classical Indian philosophy. After graduation, Ōkawa worked for the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff doing translation work. He had a sound knowledge of German, French, English, Sanskrit and Pali.
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