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,
#4351
John Woodroffe
1865 - 1936 (71 years)
Sir John George Woodroffe , also known by his pseudonym Arthur Avalon, was a British Orientalist whose extensive and complex published works on the Tantras, and other Hindu traditions, stimulated a wide-ranging interest in Hindu philosophy and yoga.
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Joe Murphy
1895 - 1920 (25 years)
Joseph Patrick Murphy was one of 22 Irish Republicans who died on hunger strike in the 20th century. He was an Officer in the Irish Republican Army who died as a result of his participation in the 1920 Cork hunger strike at Cork Gaol.
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William Anderson
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
William Anderson was a U.S. political scientist, who served on national commissions in the 1940s and 1950s. He received an A.B. degree from the University of Minnesota in 1913, and an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1914 and 1917. He was an instructor of government at Harvard until 1916, and then on the faculty of the University of Minnesota from 1916 to 1957, serving as professor and chairman of the political science department.
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Valerie Solanas
1936 - 1988 (52 years)
Valerie Jean Solanas was an American radical feminist known for the SCUM Manifesto, which she self-published in 1967, and for her attempt to murder artist Andy Warhol in 1968. Solanas had a turbulent childhood, suffering sexual abuse from both her father and grandfather, and experiencing a volatile relationship with her mother and stepfather. She came out as a lesbian in the 1950s. After graduating with a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, Solanas relocated to Berkeley. There she began writing the SCUM Manifesto, which urged women to "overthrow the government,...
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Athanasius Kircher
1602 - 1680 (78 years)
Athanasius Kircher was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath who published around 40 major works of comparative religion, geology, and medicine. Kircher has been compared to fellow Jesuit Roger Joseph Boscovich and to Leonardo da Vinci for his vast range of interests, and has been honoured with the title "Master of a Hundred Arts". He taught for more than 40 years at the Roman College, where he set up a wunderkammer. A resurgence of interest in Kircher has occurred within the scholarly community in recent decades.
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Hellmut Wilhelm
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Hellmut Wilhelm was a German Sinologist known for his studies of both Chinese literature and Chinese history. Wilhelm was an expert on the ancient Chinese divination text I Ching , which he believed to represent the essence of Chinese thought. He also produced one of the most widely used German-Chinese dictionaries of the 20th century. He held teaching positions at Peking University and the University of Washington.
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Heinrich Ewald
1803 - 1875 (72 years)
Georg Heinrich August Ewald was a German orientalist, Protestant theologian, and Biblical exegete. He studied at the University of Göttingen. In 1827 he became extraordinary professor there, in 1831 ordinary professor of theology, and in 1835 professor of oriental languages. In 1837, as a member of the Göttingen Seven, he lost his position at Göttingen on account of his protest against King Ernst August's abrogation of the liberal constitution, and became professor of theology at the University of Tübingen. In 1848, he returned to his old position at Göttingen. When Hanover was annexed by Prussia in 1866, Ewald became a defender of the rights of the ex-king.
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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
1834 - 1902 (68 years)
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, , better known as Lord Acton, was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer. He is best remembered for the remark he wrote in a letter to an Anglican bishop in 1887: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
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Robert Baldwin
1804 - 1858 (54 years)
Robert Baldwin was an Upper Canadian lawyer and politician who with his political partner Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine of Lower Canada, led the first responsible government ministry in the Province of Canada. "Responsible Government" marked the province's democratic self-government, without a revolution, although not without violence. This achievement also included the introduction of municipal government, the introduction of a modern legal system and the Canadian jury system, and the abolishing of imprisonment for debt. Baldwin is also noted for feuding with the Orange Order and other fraternal societies.
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Francesco Guicciardini
1483 - 1540 (57 years)
Francesco Guicciardini was an Italian historian and statesman. A friend and critic of Niccolò Machiavelli, he is considered one of the major political writers of the Italian Renaissance. In his masterpiece, The History of Italy, Guicciardini paved the way for a new style in historiography with his use of government sources to support arguments and the realistic analysis of the people and events of his time.
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Alice Mabel Bacon
1858 - 1918 (60 years)
Alice Mabel Bacon was an American writer, women's educator and a foreign advisor to the Japanese government in Meiji period Japan. Early life Alice Mabel Bacon was the youngest of the three daughters and two sons of Reverend Leonard Bacon, pastor of the Center Church in New Haven, Connecticut, professor at the Yale Divinity School, and his second wife, Catherine Elizabeth Terry. In 1872, when Alice was fourteen, Japanese envoy Mori Arinori selected her father's home as a residence for Japanese women being sent overseas for education by the Meiji government, as part of the Iwakura Mission. Alice received twelve-year-old Yamakawa Sutematsu as her house-guest.
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William Martin Leake
1777 - 1860 (83 years)
William Martin Leake FRS was an English soldier, spy, topographer, diplomat, antiquarian, writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society. He served in the British Army, spending much of his career in the Mediterranean seaports. He developed an interest in geography and culture of the regions visited, and authored a number of works, mainly about Greece.
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Francis Coker
1878 - 1963 (85 years)
Francis William Coker was an American political scientist and the chairman of the Department of Government at Yale University from 1937 to 1945. Coker's work focused on political theory, particularly theories of the state and the nature of democracy.
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Brian Houghton Hodgson
1800 - 1894 (94 years)
Brian Houghton Hodgson was a pioneer naturalist and ethnologist working in India and Nepal where he was a British Resident. He described numerous species of birds and mammals from the Himalayas, and several birds were named after him by others such as Edward Blyth. He was a scholar of Newar Buddhism and wrote extensively on a range of topics relating to linguistics and religion. He was an opponent of the British proposal to introduce English as the official medium of instruction in Indian schools.
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Jean-Jacques Dessalines
1758 - 1806 (48 years)
Jean-Jacques Dessalines was a Haitian revolutionary, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, and the first ruler of an independent Haiti under the 1805 constitution. Initially regarded as governor-general, Dessalines was later named Emperor of Haiti as Jacques I by generals of the Haitian Revolution Army and ruled in that capacity until being assassinated in 1806. He has been referred to as the father of the nation of Haiti.
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Bernard Brodie
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Bernard Brodie was an American military strategist well known for establishing the basics of nuclear strategy. Known as "the American Clausewitz," and "the original nuclear strategist," he was an initial architect of nuclear deterrence strategy and tried to ascertain the role and value of nuclear weapons after their creation.
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Georgy Chicherin
1872 - 1936 (64 years)
Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and a Soviet politician who served as the first People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the Soviet government from March 1918 to July 1930.
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Edward Granville Browne
1862 - 1926 (64 years)
Edward Granville Browne FBA was a British Iranologist. He published numerous articles and books, mainly in the areas of history and literature. Life Browne was born in Stouts Hill, Uley, Gloucestershire, England, the son of civil engineer Benjamin Chapman Browne and his wife, Annie. He was educated at Trinity College, Glenalmond, Burnside's School in Berkshire, Eton College, and the Newcastle College of Physical Science. He then read natural sciences at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He also studied Arabic with Edward Henry Palmer and William Wright, Persian with Edward Byles Cowell, and Turkish with Sir James Redhouse, motivated by an interest in the Turkish people.
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Andrei Kirilenko
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Andrei Pavlovich Kirilenko was a Soviet statesman from the start to the end of the Cold War. In 1906, Kirilenko was born at Alexeyevka in Belgorod Oblast to a Ukrainian working-class family. He graduated in the 1920s from a local vocational school, and again in the mid-to-late 1930s from the Rybinsk Aviation Technology Institute. He became a member of the All-Union Communist Party in 1930. As many like him, Kirilenko climbed up the Soviet hierarchy through the "industrial ladder"; by the 1960s, he was vice-chairman of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic .
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Richard Allen
1760 - 1831 (71 years)
Richard Allen was a minister, educator, writer, and one of the United States' most active and influential black leaders. In 1794, he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church , the first independent Black denomination in the United States. He opened his first AME church in 1794 in Philadelphia.
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Wesley R. Fishel
1919 - 1977 (58 years)
Wesley R. Fishel was a professor of political science at Michigan State University. He is best known for his involvement in the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group, where he served as the Chief Advisor from 1956 to 1958. Fishel was an active proponent of America's influence in Vietnam, and was a close friend of South Vietnam's leader, Ngo Dinh Diem. He continued working as a professor at MSU until his death in 1977.
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G. Homer Durham
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
George Homer Durham was an American academic administrator and was a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1977 until his death. Early life Durham was born in Parowan, Utah, and was raised in Salt Lake City. As a boy in grade school, he met and became lifelong friends with future LDS Church president Gordon B. Hinckley. As a young man, Durham served as a missionary for the LDS Church in the British Mission, where he served as president of the mission's Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association. At the start of his mission, Durham's mission president was John A.
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Richard Olaf Winstedt
1878 - 1966 (88 years)
Sir Richard Olaf Winstedt , or more commonly R. O. Winstedt, was an English Orientalist and colonial administrator with expertise in British Malaya. Life and career Winstedt was born in Oxford and educated at Magdalen College School and New College, Oxford, from which he received an MA. His brother was Eric Otto Winstedt, a Latinist and gypsiologist.
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Edward Denison Ross
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Sir Edward Denison Ross was an orientalist and linguist, specializing in languages of the Middle East, Central and East Asia. He was the first director of the University of London's School of Oriental Studies from 1916 to 1937.
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Matthew Prior
1664 - 1721 (57 years)
Matthew Prior was an English poet and diplomat. He is also known as a contributor to The Examiner. Early life Prior was probably born in Middlesex. He was the son of a Nonconformist joiner at Wimborne Minster, East Dorset. His father moved to London, and sent him to Westminster School, under Dr Richard Busby. After his father's death, he left school, and was cared for by his uncle, a vintner in Channel Row. Here, Lord Dorset found him reading Horace, and set him to translate an ode. He did so well that the Earl offered to contribute to the continuation of his education at Westminster.
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Frederick C. Mosher
1913 - 1990 (77 years)
Frederick Camp "Fritz" Mosher was a professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia who strongly influenced a generation of scholars in public administration with his many writings, and government administrator. Mosher was an important member of the second generation of public administration scholars along with his close friend, Dwight Waldo, and others who helped define the modern structure and function of the field as taught in hundreds of PA programs around the world.
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Tetsuji Morohashi
1883 - 1982 (99 years)
Tetsuji Morohashi was an important figure in the field of Japanese language studies and Sinology. He is best known as chief editor of the Dai Kan-Wa jiten, a comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters, or kanji.
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John Erskine, Earl of Mar
1675 - 1732 (57 years)
John Erskine, 23rd and 6th Earl of Mar, KT , was a Scottish Jacobite who was the eldest son of Charles, 22nd and 5th Earl of Mar , from whom he inherited estates that were heavily loaded with debt. He was the 23rd Earl of Mar in the first creation of the earldom. He was also the sixth earl in the seventh creation . He was nicknamed Bobbing John, for his tendency to shift back and forth from faction to faction, whether from Tory to Whig or Jacobite to Hanoverian. Deprived of office by the new king in 1714, Mar raised the standard of rebellion against the Hanoverians; at the battle of Sheriffmuir in November 1715, Mar's forces outnumbered those of his opponent, but victory eluded him.
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John Archibald Fairlie
1872 - 1947 (75 years)
John Archibald Fairlie was a Scottish-born political scientist who spent his professional career in the United States. Biography Fairlie was born in Glasgow, Scotland in October 1872. He moved with his family to Jacksonville, Florida in 1881 at age eight. He graduated from Jacksonville High School in 1887. He attended Harvard University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1895 and a Master of Arts degree in 1896. He enrolled at the Columbia University School of Political Science in 1897, earning a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1898. After spending a year as the secretary to the Roose...
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Wilhelm Tomaschek
1841 - 1901 (60 years)
Wilhelm Tomaschek, or Vilém Tomášek was a Czech-Austrian geographer and orientalist. He is known for his work in the fields of historical topography and historical ethnography. Born at Olmütz, in Moravia, he received his education at the University of Vienna , afterwards working as a teacher in gymnasiums at Sankt Pölten and Vienna. On the strength of the first volume of Centralasiatische Studien, he was named an associate professor of geography at the University of Graz in 1877. In 1881 he attained the rank of full professor, and in 1885, was appointed chair of historical geography at the University of Vienna.
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Joseph E. Johnson
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Joseph Esrey Johnson was an American government official who served with both the United States Department of State and the United Nations. Born in Virginia, Johnson received his educatation at Harvard University. He was instructor in history at Bowdoin College and Williams College, becoming Associate Professor at the latter in 1938. In 1942 he joined the wartime State Department. Johnson became chief of the department's Division of International Security Affairs in 1945, having served as acting chief from 1944.
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Reginald Bassett
1901 - 1962 (61 years)
Reginald Bassett was an English historian and Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics. Career Having left school to become a solicitor's clerk, at the age of 25 Bassett won a scholarship to study for a diploma at Ruskin College, Oxford, and from there proceeded to New College, Oxford. He was a lecturer under the Extra-Mural Studies Delegacy of the University of Oxford, lecturing mainly in Sussex. From 1945-50 he was a tutor at the London School of Economics for a course designed for students from trade unions. He was lecturer in political science from 1950 to 1953, Re...
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Aloys Sprenger
1813 - 1893 (80 years)
Aloys Sprenger was an Austrian Orientalist. Sprenger studied medicine, natural sciences as well as oriental languages at the University of Vienna. In 1836 he moved to London, where he worked with the Earl of Munster on the latter's Geschichte der Kriegswissenschaften bei den mohammedanischen Völkern, ‘History of Military Science among the Muslim Peoples’, and thence in 1843 to Calcutta, where he became principal of Delhi College. In this capacity he had many textbooks translated into Hindustani from European languages.
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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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Rasmus B. Anderson
1846 - 1936 (90 years)
Rasmus Bjørn Anderson was an American author, professor, editor, businessman and diplomat. He brought to popular attention the fact that Viking explorers were the first Europeans to arrive in the New World and was the originator of Leif Erikson Day.
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Georgiy Afanasyev
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Georgiy Afanasyev was a Ukrainian historian, politician, and diplomat. Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian State . Received a master's degree for his thesis: "The main points of the ministerial Turgot" ; and his doctoral dissertation was: "The Conditions of the Grain Trade in France at the End of the 18th Century" . From 1888 he lectured at the Odessa University. He read in Odessa and Kiev.
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