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.
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#4451
August Fischer
1865 - 1949 (84 years)
August Fischer was a German orientalist. From 1883 to 1889 he studied theology and Oriental philology at the universities of Berlin, Marburg and Halle, receiving his doctorate with a thesis on the source biographies of Ibn Ishaq, Biographien von Gewährsmännern des Ibn Ishaq. In 1890 he obtained his habilitation for Oriental philology at the University of Halle, and several years later became an associate professor in Berlin. From 1900 to 1930 he was a full professor of Oriental philology at the University of Leipzig, where in 1914/15 he served as dean to the faculty of philosophy. For several...
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Ernst Friedrich Karl Rosenmüller
1768 - 1835 (67 years)
Ernst Friedrich Karl Rosenmüller was a German Orientalist and Protestant theologian. Biography He was the eldest son of the rationalist theologian Johann Georg Rosenmüller. He became identified with the University of Leipzig, first as a student, in 1792 as a tutor, extraordinary professor of Arabic in 1796, and ordinary professor of Oriental languages from 1813 to the time of his death, 1835. He promoted the study of the Arabic language, brought within the reach of theologians the rapidly increasing knowledge of his day with reference to the conditions of the East, and endeavored to raise the...
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Hellmut Ritter
1892 - 1971 (79 years)
Hellmut Ritter was a leading German Orientalist specializing in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and an authority on Sufi ritual and mystical beliefs. Biography The son of a Protestant minister, his brothers were the conservative historian Gerhard Ritter and the theologist Karl Bernhard Ritter. He was educated at Halle where he studied under Carl Brockelmann and Paul Kahle, then at Strasbourg under Carl Heinrich Becker. He then served as a military interpreter during World War I in Iraq, Palestine and Iran. In 1919 he became a teaching assistant at the University of Hamburg, researching classical Arabic literature and Greek and medieval alchemy.
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Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen
1894 - 1969 (75 years)
Otto John Maenchen-Helfen was an Austrian academic, sinologist, historian, author, and traveler. From 1927 to 1930, he worked at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, and from 1930 to 1933 in Berlin. When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, he returned to Austria, and after the Anschluss in 1938 he emigrated to the United States, eventually becoming a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the author of several oft-cited books, including a history of the Huns.
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Francis Walsingham
1532 - 1590 (58 years)
Sir Francis Walsingham was principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth I of England from 20 December 1573 until his death and is popularly remembered as her "spymaster". Born to a well-connected family of gentry, Walsingham attended Cambridge University and travelled in continental Europe before embarking on a career in law at the age of twenty. A committed Protestant, during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I of England he joined other expatriates in exile in Switzerland and northern Italy until Mary's death and the accession of her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth.
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Oscar Straus
1850 - 1926 (76 years)
Oscar Solomon Straus was an American politician and diplomat. He served as United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor under President Theodore Roosevelt from 1906 to 1909, making him the first Jewish United States Cabinet Secretary.
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Friedrich Hirth
1845 - 1927 (82 years)
Friedrich Hirth, Ph.D. was a German-American sinologist. Biography He was educated at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin, and Greifswald . He was in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service from 1870 to 1897. In 1902, Professor Hirth was appointed to the first Dean Lung Professorship of Chinese at Columbia University .
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Friedrich Schwally
1863 - 1919 (56 years)
Friedrich Zacharias Schwally was a German Orientalist with professorships at Strasbourg, Gießen and Königsberg. He held the degrees of PhD, Lic. Theol., Dr. Habil., and the Imperial honour of the Order of the Red Eagle, Class IV.
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Marius Canard
1888 - 1982 (94 years)
Marius Canard FBA was a French Orientalist and historian. Biography He was born in a small village in the region of Morvan, where his father was a school teacher. Canard studied at the Collège Bonaparte in Autun and completed his studies in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lyon, where he learned the Arabic, Turkish and Persian languages under the guidance of his coeval Gaston Wiet .
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Hermann Guthe
1849 - 1936 (87 years)
Hermann Guthe was a German Semitic scholar. He was educated at Göttingen and Erlangen, and afterwards worked for several years as a private tutor. In 1884 he became a professor of Old Testament exegesis at Leipzig University.
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Theophilus Siegfried Bayer
1694 - 1738 (44 years)
Theophilus Siegfried Bayer , was a German classical scholar with specialization in Sinology. He was a Sinologist and professor of Greek and Roman Antiquities at St Petersburg Academy of Sciences between 1726 and 1737.
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Johannes Rahder
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Johannes Rahder , Dutch Orientalist, professor of Japanese at the University of Leiden and Yale University . Biography Rahder was born in Lubuk Begalung, the Dutch East Indies, now a subdistrict of Padang, where his father was governor of the west coast of Sumatra. The fact that he requested as a birthday present a library when he was five years old suggests that he was a precocious child.
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Nikolay Veselovsky
1848 - 1918 (70 years)
Nikolai Ivanovich Veselovsky was a Russian archaeologist and orientalist. Born in Moscow, Veselovsky went to school in Vologda, and then studied at Saint Petersburg State University. Reader in 1877, extraordinarius in 1884, ordinarius from 1890.
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John Wesley Hill
1863 - 1936 (73 years)
John Wesley Hill was an American Methodist minister, political activist, author, and the chancellor of Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, from 1916 to 1936. Early life Hill was born on May 8, 1863, in Kalida, Ohio. Hill's father was John Wesley Hill . Hill's mother was Elizabeth Hughes Hill . Hill attended Ohio Northern University and then took classes at the Methodist Boston Theological Seminary.
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George A. Kennedy
1901 - 1960 (59 years)
George Alexander Kennedy , was an American sinologist known for his studies of classical Chinese and for his teaching of Chinese to students. Life and career George Kennedy was born on 17 May 1901 in Moganshan, Zhejiang Province, China, where his parents Alexander and Ada Kennedy were serving as Protestant missionaries. Although his family spoke English at home, Kennedy grew up speaking the local Chinese dialect, a form of Wu Chinese, and often said that Chinese was his native language. The Kennedy family left China in 1918 after George's father and brother Fred died less than a month apart. They returned to the United States, where Kennedy attended the College of Wooster.
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Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare
1856 - 1924 (68 years)
Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, was a British orientalist, Fellow of University College, Oxford, and Professor of Theology at the University of Oxford. Biography Conybeare was born in Coulsdon, Surrey, the third son of a barrister, John Charles Conybeare, and grandson of the geologist William Daniel Conybeare. He took an interest in the Order of Corporate Reunion, an Old Catholic organization, becoming a Bishop in it in 1894. Also in the 1890s he wrote a book on the Dreyfus case, as a Dreyfusard, and translated the Testament of Solomon and other early Christian texts. As well, he did influential work on Barlaam and Josaphat.
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Carl Robert Osten-Sacken
1828 - 1906 (78 years)
Carl Robert Osten-Sacken or Carl-Robert Romanovich, Baron von der Osten-Sacken, Baron Osten Sacken was a Russian diplomat and entomologist. He served as the Russian consul general in New York City during the American Civil War, living in the United States from 1856 to 1877. He worked on the taxonomy of flies in general and particularly of the family Tipulidae .
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Thomas Hyde
1636 - 1703 (67 years)
Thomas Hyde was an English linguist, historian, librarian, classicist, and orientalist. His chief work was the 1700 [On the Ancient Religion of the Persians], the first attempt to use Arab and Persian sources to correct the errors of Greek and Roman historians in their descriptions of Zoroastrianism and the other beliefs of the ancient Persians.
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Edward Samuel Corwin
1878 - 1963 (85 years)
Edward Samuel Corwin was an American legal scholar who served as the president of the American Political Science Association. His various political writings in the early to mid-twentieth century microcosmically depict the rising activist thinking in various areas of American, constitutional law.
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Julie Novkov
Julie Novkov is an American political scientist, currently a professor of political science and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She studies the history of American law, American political development, and subordinated identities, with a focus on how laws are used for social control while also being affected by social reform movements.
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Philip Marshall Brown
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Philip Marshall Brown was an American educator and diplomat, born at Hampden, Maine, and educated at Williams College. In 1900–1901, he served as secretary to Lloyd C. Griscom and from 1901 to 1903 was second secretary for the American Legation of Constantinople. He served as Secretary of legation to Guatemala and Honduras, 1903–1907, and as secretary of the American Embassy of Constantinople, 1907–1908. From the latter year to 1910 he was minister to Honduras. Resigning from the diplomatic service, he was appointed instructor in international law at Harvard University in 1912 and in the foll...
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Harold Foote Gosnell
1896 - 1997 (101 years)
Harold Foote Gosnell was an American political scientist and writer, known for his research and writings on American politics, elections, and political parties. Gosnell attended the University of Rochester, graduating summa cum laude in 1918. He went on to the University of Chicago, where in 1922 he received his doctorate. He became a professor at Chicago and taught there until 1941. During World War II, he went to Washington, D.C., as a budget analyst and later as an operations officer for the United States Department of State, while he continued to study and write on politics. He served in the federal government until 1960, and was on the faculty at American University.
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Daniel David Luckenbill
1881 - 1927 (46 years)
Daniel David Luckenbill was an American assyriologist and professor at the University of Chicago. Publications Complete bibliography:John A. Maynard: In Memoriam: A Bibliography of D. D. Luckenbill. In: The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures. 45, 1929, S. 90–93. A Study of the temple documents from the Cassite period. The Chicago University Press, Chicago 1907. Thesis PhD Annals of Sennacherib. The Chicago University Press, Chicago 1924. Reprint 2005. .Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia. The Chicago University Press, Chicago 1926/1927. Mehrfache Reprints.Bd. 1 Historical records of Assyria: from the earliest times to Sargon.Bd.
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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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