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There are many important people who changed the course of history, yet some of them unfortunately go unremembered. Below are 29 little known people who had a profound impact on the world.
Also see: People who made a difference and changed the world for the better. 1. Jesus of Nazareth (circa 5 BCE – 30 CE) Spiritual Teacher, central figure of Christianity. 2. Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826) American President 1801 – 1809. Author of Declaration of Independence
There are, of course, a few people whose names will live long after them. And then there are those anonymous pioneers whose achievements, good and bad, changed the course of history but whose names are, for the most part, unknown to us.
Two people will devote their lives to working toward the same world changing goal, with one gaining global recognition while the other slides into obscurity. So what makes one person famous while the other remains an unknown? Good PR is often a part of it, of course.
Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.Adolf Hitler: 1889-1945. ... Karl Marx: 1818-1883. ... Charles Darwin: 1809-1882. ... 18 of the Greatest Religious Leaders in History.Friedrich Wohler: 1800-1882. ... Richard Trevithick: 1771-1833. ... Hernan Cortes: 1485-1547.More items...•
1. Jesus of Nazareth (circa 5 BCE – 30 CE) Spiritual Teacher, central figure of Christianity. (1931 – ) Leader of Soviet Union 1985 – 1991, oversaw the transition from Communism to democracy in Eastern Europe.
Individuals cannot make history on their own but sometimes an individual and the times they live in meet to produce dramatic change, according to Margaret MacMillan, Oxford Professor of International History, who delivered the 2017 Annual Edmund Burke Lecture.
Inspirational people – People who made a difference in a positive way and left the world a better place. Includes Eleanor Roosevelt, Mother Teresa and Emil Zatopek. – People who campaigned for equality, civil rights and civil justice. Includes Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.
1. Jesus Christ: In Bethlehem, Palestine, Jesus Christ was born. He was born to Mary, who was found carrying a child of the Holy Spirit, according to the Bible (Matthew 1:18). He was both a human and a divine being (John 20:28).
Top 50 Greatest Heroes and VillainsRankHeroes1.Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird2.Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark3.James Bond, Dr. No4.Rick Blaine, Casablanca46 more rows
: the way things happened or will happen a discovery that could change the course of history.
1. change of course - a change in the direction that you are moving. change of direction, reorientation - the act of changing the direction in which something is oriented. turning, turn - the act of changing or reversing the direction of the course; "he took a turn to the right"
Individuals do indeed make history. But they cannot influence society or history in any direction they so choose. Individuals cannot exert their will independently of the social conditions in which they find themselves.
Top 100 ListMuhammad (570 – 632 AD) Prophet of Islam.Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) – British mathematician and scientist.Jesus of Nazareth (c. ... Buddha (c 563 – 483 BC) Spiritual Teacher and founder of Buddhism.Confucius (551 – 479 BC) – Chinese philosopher.St. ... Ts'ai Lun (AD 50 – 121) Inventor of paper.More items...
Here are the 12 women who changed the worldJane Austen (1775 – 1817) ... Anne Frank (1929 – 1945) ... Maya Angelou (1928 – 2014) ... Queen Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603) ... Catherine the Great (1729 – 1796) ... Sojourner Truth (1797 – 1883) ... Rosa Parks (1913 – 2005) ... Malala Yousafzai (1997 - Present)More items...•
Our overall top 30 Jesus. Napoleon. Muhammad. William Shakespeare. Abraham Lincoln. George Washington. Adolf Hitler. Aristotle.More items...•
Sometimes you can go back to a particular moment in history and say that if it hadn’t been for one person, things would have been very different. This is the story of five of those people.
Using Madame Anna Chennault as a go-between, Kissinger opened a private channel to the government of South Vietnamese president Thieu. Hinting very strongly that the impending peace treaty would be unfavorable to South Vietnam, Kissinger persuaded Thieu to withdraw from talks, effectively sabotaging the peace process.
Source: Mount Holyoke College. Henry Kissinger moved through American politics like a latter-day Talleyrand. Starting as a government lawyer and rising to prominence during Johnson’s term, he became one of the few advisors to make the transition into the Nixon Administration.
During the 1968 presidential campaign, Johnson’s chosen political heir, Hubert Humphrey, was widely regarded as having a lock on the race. His ace in the hole was continuing the Paris peace talks, which were expected to bring the increasingly unpopular US involvement in Vietnam to a close.
As a twelve-year-old boy, the future Khan (then known as Temujin) lost his father, a tribal chieftain, when he was poisoned by Tartars. Things like that usually ended with the slain chieftain’s whole family being wiped out, but Temujin escaped into the wilderness with his mother and a few loyal supporters.
Like Earhart, her body was never recovered. 2. Alfred Russel Wallace. While Charles Darwin is credited with being the man behind the Theory of Evolution, it was actually another British naturalist whose theory of natural selection would inspire Darwin’s ground-breaking Origins of the Species.
In fact, the feat had actually been accomplished eight years earlier by two British aviators, John Alcock and Arthur Brown, in a modified Vickers Vimy bomber. The duo flew the rickety, two-engined plane from St. John’s, Newfoundland to Connemara, Ireland in June of 1919.
Most people assume that Adolf Hitler created the Nazi party back in the 1920s, but that wasn’t the case. The German Workers’ Party (the precursor the National Socialist Party) was actually the creation of Anton Drexler, who founded the party in 1919 during the aftermath of World War I. Hitler, it turns out, was actually an early convert to Drexler’s anti-Semitic, anti-Communist organization. In any case, Hitler’s power of persuasion and oratorical skills so impressed Drexler that he recruited him to be his propaganda chief, a move he would come to regret when within two years his protégé would rise so quickly through the party hierarchy that in July of 1921, Hitler actually displaced Drexler as head of the party and pushed Drexler into the background.
People often consider Thomas Edison the most prolific inventor in history, but many would be surprised to know that he is far surpassed for that honor by a man who is still inventing today. Kia Silverbrook is an Australian inventor who started his first company at the age of 19 in 1977, and since then has been inventing all sorts of useful devices, many of which you probably use today without even knowing it. He currently has over 4,600 patents to his name, and almost 10,000 total patents or patent applications registered in the international patent document database.
Alfred Wallace was an anthropologist and explorer , as well as a contemporary of Darwin’s, who had written numerous papers on the subject of natural selection, demonstrating that the two men had come up with essentially the same idea independently of each other.
Gustav Whitehead. The Wright Brothers are credited as being the first to flight, but it turns out that may not be entirely accurate. There was another man working on achieving flight at the same time who has been largely forgotten by aviation historians.
Alexander Graham Bell is credited with the invention of the telephone, but you probably didn’t realize it all came down to his attorney’s punctuality. Had he arrived at the U.S. Patent Office just two hours later, we would be talking about Elisha Gray being the man behind the squawk box, and Bell would have been just another of a long line of men who missed their chance at fame and fortune.
The main reason he's forgotten about is because Hitler used him as a poster boy to represent "Germanic freedom". Barseps.
Known as Ptolemy II in Europe during the Renaissance and the smartest man to have lived before Newton came along, he was the founder of geometric optics and used his discovery to estimate the height of earth's atmosphere, discovered that white light was composed of seven colors half a millennium before Newton did, was one of the first analytical geometers and his greatest achievement of them all, was the founder of the scientific method that convinced the world to move on from Greek philosophy to embrace science based on experiment.
Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. One thing that is left out in the very few conversations about Cyrus is that without him there would've arguably been no Jews. So no Judaism, Christianity, or Islam without Cyrus.
12. A real genius actress. Hedy Lamarr. Remembered somewhat as a glamour-girl actress in the 1930s & '40s, but also helped to invent spread-spectrum and frequency-hopping technologies that are a basis for wifi, CDMA, and Bluetooth.
A mathematic hero! A lot of Middle Eastern mathematicians and scientists from the Islamic Golden Age have been forgotten. During the dark ages, Europe had lost almost all previous knowledge and records, but at the same time in the Arab world, scholars were preserving these texts and doing further studies.
The most influential person in training new doctors wasn’t a doctor at all. Abraham Flexner was an educator who was the founder and director of a preparatory college in Louisville, Kentucky.
The picture was taken at a camp of displaced people in 1946. If the person in the picture is really Grynszpan, it means he survived the war.
The problem with the Multics project was that the operating system was too complex.
He helped Hitler find his voice and trained him to use his charisma. Eckart also introduced him to influential circles of people and Hitler was able to raise money for the German Workers’ Party.
6. Dietrich Eckart. One of Adolf Hitler’s strongest personality traits was his charisma. It’s arguably the main he was able to ascend to his position of power, which directly led to World War II and the Holocaust.
Born in the Bronx in September 1941, Dennis Ritchie got degrees from Harvard University in physics and applied mathematics and then went to work at Bell Lab in Murray Hill, New Jersey. In the mid-1960s, Ritchie worked on a project called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), which was a joint venture between Bell Lab, General Electric, and MIT. Bell Lab pulled out of the project in 1969, and Ritchie, along with his partner Ken Thompson, thought it was too bad they had to exit the project because they thought it had a lot of promise.
Eckart was a fierce anti-critic of the Treaty of Versailles and he blamed Germany’s loss in World War I on the Jews and social democrats. Months before Eckart met Hitler, he wrote a poem in which he would meet someone he called “the Great One,” “the Nameless One,” and “Whom all can sense but no one saw.”.
Including The Republic, The Iliad, The Communist Manifesto and The King James Bible. Inspirational people : People who made a difference in a positive way and left the world a better place.
Catherine the Great (1729 – 1796) Empress of all the Russias 1762 – 1796. Michael Faraday (1791 – 1867) English scientist who enabled electricity to become a viable source of power. Dr B.R. Ambedkar (1891 – 1956) Indian political activist and social reformer who drafted Indian constitution.
Artists, Writers, and Musicians: An Encyclopedia of People Who Changed the World. 101 World Heroes by Simon Montefiore. Events that changed the world. Quotes that changed the world. Speeches that changed the world.
Throughout history, there have been polarizing people who changed the world for the better or worse, but one of the most prominent would have to be Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg.
Galileo was an Italian astronomer, engineer, and physicist, who is credited as being the father of observational astronomy, the father of modern physics, the father of the scientific method, and the father of modern science. That’s a lot of kids in the world of science, but Galileo was a curious man, and when he looked up at the stars each night, he made spectacular observations, many of which we now take for granted. In his lifetime, which was between 1564 and 1642 AD, Galileo became a controversial figure, whose work landed him in trouble with the Catholic Church, even though he was himself a pious Roman Catholic.
The result of his Theses was the Protestant Reformation and the schism of the Catholic Church.
While Faraday was a deeply religious man, he never let the world of science and religion clash, which was a problem for many researchers in the 19th-century. Albert Einstein kept a photograph of Faraday on his study wall alongside Newton and Maxwell, which says plenty.
Napoléon wasn’t a profoundly religious man during his lifetime, and at most, he could be said to have been a deist. He made use of Catholocism more than participated in its practice, and though the Church excommunicated him, he reconciled with the Pontiff before his death in 1821.
He advised many presidents from Truman to Obama. Martin Luther King ( 1929 – 1968) was the leading figure in the US civil rights movement during the 1960s.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, which asserted rights and freedoms of American citizens. Thomas Jefferson passed the Statue of Religious Liberty for Virginia, which was an early right to give freedom of worship.
People of the Progressive Era (1890-1920) A period of increased federal intervention to tackle abuse of monopoly power and inequality. The Progressive Era also saw women gain the vote, and increased efforts to tackle corruption.
Henry Ford (1863 – 1947) was a businessman who revolutionised mass car production. His Ford assembly lines were so efficient they reduced the cost of family cars making them available to average workers for the first time. John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968) was one of the most influential US authors.
Jefferson was president 1800-1808 and oversaw the expansion of American territory in the West. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an English-American political writer. His pamphlet Common Sense (1776) helped create public support for the idea of American independence from Great Britain.
After the war, it was Wilson who sought to establish a League of Nations and provide a framework for resolving international conflict. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 – 1945) US President from 1932 to 1945.
Twentieth Century. Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931) Edison was one of the most prolific inventors of all time. He helped to usher in the electricity revolution inventing the electric light bulb and providing one of the first domestic electricity networks in the world.
Yellow journalists branded her “Mammy Pleasant,” accusing her of everything from murdering Thomas Bell to putting entire households under voodoo spells (Pleasant, it is said, once maintained a friendship with New Orleans voodoo queen Marie LaVeau). Pleasant’s vast fortune was lost and she died in poverty in 1904.
In the early 1920s, commercial aviation was still in its infancy, so most active fliers were stunt fliers who performed at air shows. Coleman sought out the best in the field (again, in Europe) for training, and she took to the air show circuit, where she was a big hit.
Over the next several years, Peary, always with Henson at his side, would make attempt after attempt, each one unsuccessful due to the harshness of the conditions . In 1908, they decided to make one final attempt since time was running against them (Peary was 50, Henson 40).
In the summer of 1950, the Korean War broke out, and Brown’s ship, the carrier USS Leyte, was sent to the Korean peninsula. Brown and his fellow pilots flew daily missions to protect troops threatened by China’s entrance into the war that November.
Hearing of her woes, Black newspaperman Robert Abbott, the publisher of The Chicago Defender, encouraged her to go to France to learn how to fly. He financed a trip to Paris in 1920, and for seven months, Coleman trained with some of the best pilots in Europe.
Taking note of his work, Roosevelt appointed Hastie to the federal court in the Virgin Islands, effectively making him the first federal African American judge in history.
Nicknamed “Queen Bess,” Coleman was known for her daredevil aerial tricks, and her race and her gender became a selling point instead of a liability. For five years, she barnstormed around the country, making a good living.