Ruth Benedict

She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College and graduated in 1909. After studying
anthropology at the New School of Social Research under Elsie Clews Parsons, she entered
graduate studies at Columbia University in 1921, where she studied under Franz Boas. She
received her PhD and joined the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she shared a
romantic relationship,[1] and Marvin Opler, were among her students and colleagues.

Benedict held the post of President of the American Anthropological Association and was also a
prominent member of the American Folklore Society.[2] She became the first woman to be
recognized as a prominent leader of a learned profession.[2] She can be viewed as a
transitional figure in her field, redirecting both anthropology and folklore away from the limited
confines of culture-trait diffusion studies and towards theories of performance as integral to the
interpretation of culture. She studied the relationships between personality, art, language and
culture, insisting that no trait existed in isolation or self-sufficiency, a theory which she
championed in her 1934 Patterns of Culture.

Franz Boas
Studying in Germany, Boas was awarded a doctorate in 1881 in physics while also studying
geography. He then participated in a geographical expedition to northern Canada, where he
became fascinated with the culture and language of the Baffin Island Inuit. He went on to do
field work with the indigenous cultures and languages of the Pacific Northwest. In 1887 he
emigrated to the United States, where he first worked as a museum curator at the Smithsonian,
and in 1899 became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where he remained for
the rest of his career. Through his students, many of whom went on to found anthropology
departments and research programmes inspired by their mentor, Boas profoundly influenced
the development of American anthropology. Among his most significant students were A. L.
Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and many
others.[25]

Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then-popular ideologies of scientific
racism, the idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood
through the typology of biological characteristics.[26] In a series of groundbreaking studies of
skeletal anatomy he showed that cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on
environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to the claims by racial
anthropologists of the day that held head shape to be a stable racial trait. Boas also worked to
demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate
biological dispositions but are largely the result of cultural differences acquired through social
learning. In this way, Boas introduced culture as the primary concept for describing differences
in behavior between human groups, and as the central analytical concept of anthropology.[25]

Among Boas's main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the
then-popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies
progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western
European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through the
interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas and that consequently there was no
process towards continuously "higher" cultural forms. This insight led Boas to reject the
"stage"-based organization of ethnological museums, instead preferring to order items on
display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question.

Boas also introduced the ideology of cultural relativism, which holds that cultures cannot be
objectively ranked as higher or lower, or better or more correct, but that all humans see the
world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally
acquired norms. For Boas, the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which
culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in different ways and to do
this it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and cultural practices of the
people studied. By uniting the disciplines of archaeology, the study of material culture and
history, and physical anthropology, the study of variation in human anatomy, with ethnology, the
study of cultural variation of customs, and descriptive linguistics, the study of unwritten
indigenous languages, Boas created the four-field subdivision of anthropology which became
prominent in American anthropology in the 20th century.

Auguste Comte
Influenced by the utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon,[4] Comte developed the positive
philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French Revolution, calling for a
new social doctrine based on the sciences. Comte was a major influence on 19th-century
thought, influencing the work of social thinkers such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George
Eliot.[7] His concept of sociologie and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists
and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern
academic sociology presented by Émile Durkheim as practical and objective social research.

Comte's social theories culminated in his "Religion of Humanity",[4] which presaged the
development of non-theistic religious humanist and secular humanist organizations in the 19th
century. Comte may have coined the word altruisme (altruism).

Rene Descartes
Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) continues to be a standard text at most
university philosophy departments. Descartes' influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the
Cartesian coordinate system (see below) was named after him. He is credited as the father of
analytical geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, used in the discovery of
infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific
Revolution.

Descartes refused to accept the authority of previous philosophers. He frequently set his views
apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, an
early modern treatise on emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this
topic "as if no one had written on these matters before". His best known philosophical statement
is "I think, therefore I am" (French: Je pense, donc je suis; Latin: Ego cogito, ergo sum), found in
Discourse on the Method (1637; written in French and Latin) and Principles of Philosophy
(1644; written in Latin).[19]

Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of
the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed
from the schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance into
matter and form; second, he rejected any appeal to final ends, divine or natural, in explaining
natural phenomena.[20] In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God's act of
creation.

Descartes laid the foundation for 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by
Spinoza and Leibniz, and was later opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of
Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza,[21] and Descartes were all well-versed
in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science
as well.

Emile Durkheim
Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and
coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer
assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological
work was The Division of Labour in Society (1893). In 1895, he published The Rules of
Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's
first professor of sociology.[5] In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique.
Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and
Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social
science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
(1912) presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and
modern societies.

Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate
science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could
be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the
hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of
institutions, if this term is understood in its broader meaning as "beliefs and modes of behaviour
instituted by the collectivity"[6] and its aim being to discover structural social facts. Durkheim
was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology
and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic;[7] that is, sociology
should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific
actions of individuals.

He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting
numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of
knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian
terms such as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon.

Immanuel Kant
In one of Kant's major works, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781),[22] he attempted to explain
the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond the failures of
traditional philosophy and metaphysics. Kant wanted to put an end to an era of futile and
speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as
David Hume. Kant regarded himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists
and empiricists which philosophy had led to,[23] and is widely held to have synthesized both
traditions in his thought.[24]

Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured through universal
democracy and international cooperation. He believed that this would be the eventual outcome
of universal history, although it is not rationally planned.[25] The nature of Kant's religious ideas
continues to be the subject of philosophical dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the impression
that he was an initial advocate of atheism who at some point developed an ontological argument
for God, to more critical treatments epitomized by Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had
"theologian blood"[26] and was merely a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith.[a]

Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and
history. These include the Universal Natural History (1755), the Critique of Practical Reason
(1788), the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), and the Critique of Judgment (1790), which looks at
aesthetics and teleology.

Bronislaw Malinowski
From 1910, Malinowski studied exchange and economics at the London School of Economics
(LSE) under Charles Gabriel Seligman and Edvard Alexander Westermarck, analysing patterns
of exchange in Aboriginal Australia through ethnographic documents. In 1914, he was given a
chance to travel to New Guinea accompanying anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett, but as
World War I broke out and Malinowski was an Austrian subject, and thereby an enemy of the
British commonwealth, he was unable to travel back to England. The Australian government
nonetheless provided him with permission and funds to undertake ethnographic work within
their territories and Malinowski chose to go to the Trobriand Islands, in Melanesia where he
stayed for several years, studying the indigenous culture. Upon his return to England after the
war he published his main work Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), which established him
as one of the most important anthropologists in Europe of that time. He took posts as lecturer
and later as a chair in anthropology at the LSE, attracting large numbers of students and
exerting great influence on the development of British Social Anthropology. Among his students
in this period were such prominent anthropologists as Raymond Firth, E. E. Evans-Pritchard,
Hortense Powdermaker, Edmund Leach, Audrey Richards and Meyer Fortes. From 1933 he
visited several American universities, and when World War II broke out he decided to stay there,
taking an appointment at Yale. There he stayed the remainder of his life, also influencing a
generation of American anthropologists.

His ethnography of the Trobriand Islands described the complex institution of the Kula ring, and
became foundational for subsequent theories of reciprocity and exchange. He was also widely
regarded as an eminent fieldworker and his texts regarding the anthropological field methods
were foundational to early anthropology, for example coining the term participatory observation.
His approach to social theory was a brand of psychological functionalism emphasising how
social and cultural institutions serve basic human needs, a perspective opposed to A. R.
Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism that emphasised the ways in which social institutions
function in relation to society as a whole.

Harriet Martineau
Martineau wrote many books and a multitude of essays from a sociological, holistic, religious,
domestic, and perhaps most controversially, feminine perspective; she also translated various
works by Auguste Comte.[2] She earned enough to support herself entirely by her writing, a rare
feat for a woman in the Victorian era.[citation needed]

The young Princess Victoria enjoyed reading Martineau's publications. She invited Martineau to
her coronation in 1838 — an event which Martineau described, in great and amusing detail, to
her many readers.[3][4]

Martineau said of her own approach to writing: "when one studies a society, one must focus on
all its aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She believed a thorough
societal analysis was necessary to understand women's status under men.[citation needed] The
novelist Margaret Oliphant said "as a born lecturer and politician [Martineau] was less
distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation".

Karl Marx
Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von
Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile
with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in
collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the
reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet, The
Communist Manifesto, and the three-volume Das Kapital. His political and philosophical thought
had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history and his name
has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.

Marx's theories about society, economics and politics – collectively understood as Marxism –
hold that human societies develop through class struggle. In capitalism, this manifests itself in
the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of
production and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by
selling their labour power in return for wages.[16] Employing a critical approach known as
historical materialism, Marx predicted that, like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism
produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new
system: socialism. For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism, owing in part to its instability
and crisis-prone nature, would eventuate the working class' development of class
consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a
classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers.[17] Marx actively
pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised
revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.[18]

Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and his work
has been both lauded and criticised.[19] His work in economics laid the basis for much of the
current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic
thought.[20][21][22] Many intellectuals, labour unions, artists and political parties worldwide
have been influenced by Marx's work, with many modifying or adapting his ideas. Marx is
typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science.

Margaret Mead
Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was
often controversial as an academic.[3] Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South
Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution.[4] She
was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within a context of traditional Western
religious life.

R.Radcliffe Brown
English social anthropologist of the 20th century who developed a systematic framework of
concepts and generalizations relating to the social structures of preindustrial societies and their
functions. He is widely known for his theory of functionalism and his role in the founding of
British social anthropology.
Radcliffe-Brown went to the Andaman Islands (1906–08), where his fieldwork won him a
fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. On an expedition to Western Australia (1910–12), he
concentrated on kinship and family organization. He became director of education for the
kingdom of Tonga (1916) and served as professor of social anthropology at the University of
Cape Town (1920–25), where he founded the School of African Life and Languages. His study
The Andaman Islanders (1922; new ed. 1964) contained the essential formulation of his ideas
and methods.
At the University of Sydney (1925–31) he developed a vigorous teaching program involving
research in theoretical and applied anthropology. His theory had its classic formulation and
application in The Social Organisation of Australian Tribes (1931). Treating all Aboriginal
Australia known at the time, the work cataloged, classified, analyzed, and synthesized a vast
amount of data on kinship, marriage, language, custom, occupancy and possession of land,
sexual patterns, and cosmology. He attempted to explain social phenomena as enduring
systems of adaptation, fusion, and integration of elements. He held that social structures are
arrangements of persons and that organizations are the arrangements of activities; thus, the life
of a society may be viewed as an active system of functionally consistent, interdependent
elements.
At the University of Chicago (1931–37) Radcliffe-Brown was instrumental in introducing social
anthropology to American scholars. Returning to England in 1937, he joined the faculty of the
University of Oxford (1937–46). His later works include Structure and Function in Primitive
Society (1952), Method in Social Anthropology (1958), and an edited collection of essays
entitled African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (1950), which remains a landmark in African
studies.

Max Weber
German sociologist, philosopher, jurist, and political economist. His ideas profoundly influenced
social theory and social research.[7] Weber is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx,
as among the three founders of sociology.[8][9][10][11][12] Weber was a key proponent of
methodological anti-positivism, arguing for the study of social action through interpretive (rather
than purely empiricist) means, based on understanding the purpose and meaning that
individuals attach to their own actions. Unlike Durkheim, he did not believe in mono-causality
and rather proposed that for any outcome there can be multiple causes.
Weber's main intellectual concern was understanding the processes of rationalisation,
secularisation, and "disenchantment" that he associated with the rise of capitalism and
modernity.[14] He saw these as the result of a new way of thinking about the world.[15] Weber
is best known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion,
elaborated in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he proposed
that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major "elective affinities" associated with the rise in
the Western world of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state. He argued
that it was in the basic tenets of Protestantism to boost capitalism. Thus, it can be said that the
spirit of capitalism is inherent to Protestant religious values.

Against Marx's historical materialism, Weber emphasised the importance of cultural influences
embedded in religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism.[16] The
Protestant Ethic formed the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religion; he
went on to examine the religions of China, the religions of India and ancient Judaism, with
particular regard to their differing economic consequences and conditions of social
stratification.[a] In another major work, "Politics as a Vocation", Weber defined the state as an
entity that successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given
territory". He was also the first to categorise social authority into distinct forms, which he labelled
as charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. His analysis of bureaucracy emphasised that
modern state institutions are increasingly based on rational-legal authority.

Weber also made a variety of other contributions in economic history, as well as economic
theory and methodology. Weber's analysis of modernity and rationalisation significantly
influenced the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School. After the First World War,
Max Weber was among the founders of the liberal German Democratic Party. He also ran
unsuccessfully for a seat in parliament and served as advisor to the committee that drafted the
ill-fated democratic Weimar Constitution of 1919. After contracting Spanish flu, he died of
pneumonia in 1920, aged 56.

Socrates
Socrates was a widely recognized and controversial figure in his native Athens, so much so that
he was frequently mocked in the plays of comic dramatists. (The Clouds of Aristophanes,
produced in 423, is the best-known example.) Although Socrates himself wrote nothing, he is
depicted in conversation in compositions by a small circle of his admirers—Plato and Xenophon
first among them. He is portrayed in these works as a man of great insight, integrity,
self-mastery, and argumentative skill. The impact of his life was all the greater because of the
way in which it ended: at age 70, he was brought to trial on a charge of impiety and sentenced
to death by poisoning (the poison probably being hemlock) by a jury of his fellow citizens.
Plato’s Apology of Socrates purports to be the speech Socrates gave at his trial in response to
the accusations made against him (Greek apologia means “defense”). Its powerful advocacy of
the examined life and its condemnation of Athenian democracy have made it one of the central
documents of Western thought and culture.
While Socrates was alive, he was, as noted, the object of comic ridicule, but most of the plays
that make reference to him are entirely lost or exist only in fragmentary form—Clouds being the
chief exception. Although Socrates is the central figure of this play, it was not Aristophanes’
purpose to give a balanced and accurate portrait of him (comedy never aspires to this) but
rather to use him to represent certain intellectual trends in contemporary Athens—the study of
language and nature and, as Aristophanes implies, the amoralism and atheism that accompany
these pursuits. The value of the play as a reliable source of knowledge about Socrates is thrown
further into doubt by the fact that, in Plato’s Apology, Socrates himself rejects it as a fabrication.
This aspect of the trial will be discussed more fully below.
Soon after Socrates’ death, several members of his circle preserved and praised his memory by
writing works that represent him in his most characteristic activity—conversation. His
interlocutors in these (typically adversarial) exchanges included people he happened to meet,
devoted followers, prominent political figures, and leading thinkers of the day. Many of these
“Socratic discourses,” as Aristotle calls them in his Poetics, are no longer extant; there are only
brief remnants of the conversations written by Antisthenes, Aeschines, Phaedo, and Eucleides.
But those composed by Plato and Xenophon survive in their entirety. What knowledge we have
of Socrates must therefore depend primarily on one or the other (or both, when their portraits
coincide) of these sources. (Plato and Xenophon also wrote separate accounts, each entitled
Apology of Socrates, of Socrates’ trial.) Most scholars, however, do not believe that every
Socratic discourse of Xenophon and Plato was intended as a historical report of what the real
Socrates said, word-for-word, on some occasion. What can reasonably be claimed about at
least some of these dialogues is that they convey the gist of the questions Socrates asked, the
ways in which he typically responded to the answers he received, and the general philosophical
orientation that emerged from these conversations.

Plato
He is widely considered the pivotal figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western
philosophy, along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle.[a] Plato
has also often been cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality.[4] The
so-called Neoplatonism of philosophers like Plotinus and Porphyry influenced Saint Augustine
and thus Christianity. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "the safest general characterization of
the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."[5]

Plato was the innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms in philosophy. Plato also
appears to have been the founder of Western political philosophy. His most famous contribution
bears his name, Platonism (also ambiguously called either Platonic realism or Platonic
idealism), the doctrine of the Forms known by pure reason to provide a realist solution to the
problem of universals. He is also the namesake of Platonic love and the Platonic solids.

His own most decisive philosophical influences are usually thought to have been along with
Socrates, the pre-Socratics Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Parmenides, although few of his
predecessors' works remain extant and much of what we know about these figures today
derives from Plato himself.[b] Unlike the work of nearly all of his contemporaries, Plato's entire
body of work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years.[7] Although their popularity
has fluctuated over the years, the works of Plato have never been without readers since the
time they were written.

Aristotle
Little is known about his life. Aristotle was born in the city of Stagira in Northern Greece. His
father, Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, and he was brought up by a guardian. At
seventeen or eighteen years of age, he joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there
until the age of thirty-seven (c. 347 BC).[4] Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at
the request of Philip II of Macedon, tutored Alexander the Great beginning in 343 BC.[5] He
established a library in the Lyceum which helped him to produce many of his hundreds of books
on papyrus scrolls. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues for publication,
only around a third of his original output has survived, none of it intended for publication.[6]

The fact that Aristotle was a pupil of Plato contributed to his former views of Platonism, but,
following Plato's death, Aristotle developed an increased interest in natural sciences and
adopted the position of immanent realism. Aristotle's views on physical science profoundly
shaped medieval scholarship. Their influence extended from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle
Ages into the Renaissance, and were not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and
theories such as classical mechanics. Some of Aristotle's zoological observations found in his
biology, such as on the hectocotyl (reproductive) arm of the octopus, were disbelieved until the
19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, studied by medieval
scholars such as Peter Abelard and John Buridan. Aristotle's influence on logic also continued
well into the 19th century.

He influenced Islamic thought during the Middle Ages, as well as Christian theology, especially
the Neoplatonism of the Early Church and the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church.
Aristotle was revered among medieval Muslim scholars as "The First Teacher" and among
medieval Christians like Thomas Aquinas as simply "The Philosopher". His ethics, though
always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics, such as in
the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre and Philippa Foot.

Nicolaus Copernicus
was a Renaissance-era mathematician and astronomer, who formulated a model of the
universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe, in all likelihood
independently of Aristarchus of Samos, who had formulated such a model some eighteen
centuries earlier.

Francis Bacon
Bacon has been called the father of empiricism.[6] His works argued for the possibility of
scientific knowledge based only upon inductive reasoning and careful observation of events in
nature. Most importantly, he argued science could be achieved by use of a sceptical and
methodical approach whereby scientists aim to avoid misleading themselves. Although his
practical ideas about such a method, the Baconian method, did not have a long-lasting
influence, the general idea of the importance and possibility of a sceptical methodology makes
Bacon the father of the scientific method. This method was a new rhetorical and theoretical
framework for science, the practical details of which are still central in debates about science
and methodology. Bacon was a patron of libraries and developed a functional system for the
cataloging of books by dividing them into three categories—history, poetry, and
philosophy—which could further be divided into more specific subjects and subheadings. Bacon
was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he rigorously followed the medieval
curriculum, largely in Latin.

Bacon was the first recipient of the Queen's counsel designation, which was conferred in 1597
when Queen Elizabeth reserved Bacon as her legal advisor. After the accession of King James I
in 1603, Bacon was knighted. He was later created Baron Verulam in 1618[4] and Viscount St.
Alban in 1621.[3][b] Because he had no heirs, both titles became extinct upon his death in 1626,
at 65 years. Bacon died of pneumonia, with one account by John Aubrey stating that he had
contracted the condition while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat. He is
buried at St Michael's Church, St Albans, Hertfordshire.

Martín Luther
Luther was ordained to the priesthood in 1507. He came to reject several teachings and
practices of the Roman Catholic Church; in particular, he disputed the view on indulgences.
Luther proposed an academic discussion of the practice and efficacy of indulgences in his
Ninety-five Theses of 1517. His refusal to renounce all of his writings at the demand of Pope
Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 resulted in
his excommunication by the pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor.
Luther taught that salvation and, consequently, eternal life are not earned by good deeds but
are received only as the free gift of God's grace through the believer's faith in Jesus Christ as
redeemer from sin. His theology challenged the authority and office of the Pope by teaching that
the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge,[4] and opposed sacerdotalism by
considering all baptized Christians to be a holy priesthood.[5] Those who identify with these,
and all of Luther's wider teachings, are called Lutherans, though Luther insisted on Christian or
Evangelical (German: evangelisch) as the only acceptable names for individuals who professed
Christ.

His translation of the Bible into the German vernacular (instead of Latin) made it more
accessible to the laity, an event that had a tremendous impact on both the church and German
culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language, added
several principles to the art of translation,[6] and influenced the writing of an English translation,
the Tyndale Bible.[7] His hymns influenced the development of singing in Protestant
churches.[8] His marriage to Katharina von Bora, a former nun, set a model for the practice of
clerical marriage, allowing Protestant clergy to marry.[9]

In two of his later works, Luther expressed antagonistic views towards Jews.[10] His rhetoric
was not directed at Jews alone, but also towards Roman Catholics, Anabaptists, and
nontrinitarian Christians.[11] Luther died in 1546, with his decree of excommunication by Pope
Leo X still effective.

Ferdinand Tonnies
a German sociologist and philosopher. He was a major contributor to sociological theory and
field studies, best known for his distinction between two types of social groups, Gemeinschaft
and Gesellschaft. He co-founded the German Society for Sociology, of which he was president
from 1909 to 1933, after which he was ousted for having criticized the Nazis. Tönnies was
considered the first German sociologist proper,[1] published over 900 works and contributed to
many areas of sociology and philosophy.

Marco Polo
Marco learned the mercantile trade from his father and his uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, who
travelled through Asia and met Kublai Khan. In 1269, they returned to Venice to meet Marco for
the first time. The three of them embarked on an epic journey to Asia, returning after 24 years to
find Venice at war with Genoa; Marco was imprisoned and dictated his stories to a cellmate. He
was released in 1299, became a wealthy merchant, married, and had three children. He died in
1324 and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Venice.

Though he was not the first European to reach China (see Europeans in Medieval China),
Marco Polo was the first to leave a detailed chronicle of his experience. This book inspired
Christopher Columbus[7] and many other travellers. There is substantial literature based on
Polo's writings; he also influenced European cartography, leading to the introduction of the Fra
Mauro map.
Christopher Columbus
Columbus's early life is somewhat obscure, but scholars generally agree that he was born in the
Republic of Genoa and spoke a dialect of Ligurian as his first language. He went to sea at a
young age and travelled widely, as far north as the British Isles (and possibly Iceland) and as far
south as what is now Ghana. He married Portuguese noblewoman Filipa Moniz Perestrelo and
was based in Lisbon for several years, but later took a Spanish mistress; he had one son with
each woman. Though largely self-educated, Columbus was widely read in geography,
astronomy, and history. He formulated a plan to seek a western sea passage to the East Indies,
hoping to profit from the lucrative spice trade.

After years of lobbying, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain agreed to sponsor a journey west, in the
name of the Crown of Castile. Columbus left Spain in August 1492 with three ships, and after a
stopover in the Canary Islands made landfall in the Americas on 12 October (now celebrated as
Columbus Day). His landing place was an island in the Bahamas, known by its native
inhabitants as Guanahani; its exact location is uncertain. Columbus subsequently visited Cuba
and Hispaniola, establishing a colony in what is now Haiti—the first European settlement in the
Americas since the Norse colonies almost 500 years earlier. He arrived back in Spain in early
1493, bringing a number of captive natives with him. Word of his discoveries soon spread
throughout Europe.

Columbus made three further voyages to the New World, exploring the Lesser Antilles in 1493,
Trinidad and the northern coast of South America in 1498, and the eastern coast of Central
America in 1502. Many of the names he gave to geographical features—particularly
islands—are still in use. He continued to seek a passage to the East Indies, and the extent to
which he was aware that the Americas were a wholly separate landmass is uncertain; he gave
the name indios ("Indians") to the indigenous peoples he encountered. Columbus's strained
relationship with the Spanish crown and its appointed colonial administrators in America led to
his arrest and removal from Hispaniola in 1500, and later to protracted litigation over the
benefits that he and his heirs claimed were owed to them by the crown.

Columbus's expeditions inaugurated a period of exploration, conquest, and colonization that

lasted for centuries, helping create the modern Western world. The transfers between the Old
World and New World that followed his first voyage are known as the Columbian exchange, and
the period of human habitation in the Americas prior to his arrival is known as the
Pre-Columbian era. Columbus's legacy continues to be debated. He was widely venerated in
the centuries after his death, but public perceptions have changed as recent scholars have
given attention to negative aspects of his life, such as his role in the extinction of the Taíno
people, his promotion of slavery, and allegations of tyranny towards Spanish colonists. Many
landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of
Colombia.

Ferdinand Magellan
Born into a family of the Portuguese nobility in around 1480, Magellan became a skilled sailor
and naval officer and was in service of the Portuguese crown in Asia. After King Manuel I of
Portugal refused to support his plan to reach India by a new route, by sailing around the
southern end of America, he was eventually selected by King Charles I of Spain to search for a
westward route to the Maluku Islands (the "Spice Islands"). Commanding a fleet of five vessels,
he headed south through the Atlantic Ocean to Patagonia, passing through the Strait of
Magellan into a body of water he named the "peaceful sea" (the modern Pacific Ocean). Despite
a series of storms and mutinies, the expedition reached the Spice Islands in 1521 and returned
home via the Indian Ocean to complete the first circuit of the globe. Magellan did not complete
the entire voyage, as he was killed during the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines in 1521.

Magellan had already reached the Malay Archipelago in Southeast Asia on previous voyages
traveling east (from 1505 to 1511–1512). By visiting this area again but now travelling west,
Magellan achieved a nearly complete personal circumnavigation of the globe for the first time in
history.[3][4]

The Magellanic penguin is named after him, as he was the first European to note it.[5]
Magellan's navigational skills have also been acknowledged in the naming of objects associated
with the stars, including the Magellanic Clouds, now known to be two nearby dwarf galaxies; the
twin lunar craters of Magelhaens and Magelhaens A; and the Martian crater of Magelhaens.

Charles Tilly
an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between
politics and society. He was professor of history, sociology, and social science at the University
of Michigan 1969–1984 and in his last position the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social
Science at Columbia University. He has been described as "the founding father of 21st-century
sociology"[1] and "one of the world's preeminent sociologists and historians" as his "scholarship
was unsurpassed, his humanity of the highest order, his spirit unwavering."[2] After his death,
numerous special journal issues, conferences, awards and obituaries appeared in his honor.

Walter Lippmann
an American writer, reporter, and political commentator famous for being among the first to
introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological
meaning, and critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books,
most notably his 1922 book Public Opinion.[3] Lippmann was also a notable author for the
Council on Foreign Relations, until he had an affair with the editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong's
wife, which led to a falling out between the two men. Lippmann also played a notable role in
Woodrow Wilson's post-World War I board of inquiry, as its research director. His views
regarding the role of journalism in a democracy were contrasted with the contemporaneous
writings of John Dewey in what has been retrospectively named the Lippmann-Dewey debate.
Lippmann won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his syndicated newspaper column "Today and
Tomorrow" and one for his 1961 interview of Nikita Khrushchev.
He has also been highly praised with titles ranging anywhere from "most influential"
journalist[6][7][8] of the 20th century, to "Father of Modern Journalism".[9][10]
Michael Schudson writes[11] that James W. Carey considered Walter Lippmann's book Public
Opinion as "the founding book of modern journalism" and also "the founding book in American
media studies".