Thinkers Timeline

Sima Qian was a Chinese historian and writer. He lived from around 145 BCE to about 86 BCE, during the Western Han dynasty. He is often called the father of Chinese history. His great work, the Shiji or Records of the Grand Historian, set the model for how history was written in China for the next 2,000 years. He was born in a small town in what is now Shaanxi province, in central China. His father, Sima Tan, was a court historian and astronomer at the imperial court of Emperor Wu. Sima Qian was educated as a scholar and travelled widely across the Han empire as a young man. He visited important historical sites and gathered materials for what would become his great work. When his father died in 110 BCE, Sima Qian inherited the position of grand historian. In 99 BCE, his life took a terrible turn. A Han general named Li Ling had surrendered to the Xiongnu, a nomadic enemy people. Sima Qian defended Li Ling at court. The emperor was furious. Sima Qian was sentenced to death. He could escape death only by paying a fine he could not afford or by accepting castration. Most men of his class would have chosen suicide. Sima Qian chose castration. He explained later that he had to live to finish his history. The choice was deeply shameful in his society but allowed him to complete the Shiji. He finished the work around 91 BCE and died a few years later. The Shiji has been read continuously ever since.

Ban Zhao was a Chinese historian, poet, and teacher of the Eastern Han dynasty. She is the first known woman historian of China. She was born around 45 CE in Anling, near modern Xianyang in Shaanxi province. Her family was a famous scholarly household. Her father Ban Biao was a respected scholar and historian. Her two older twin brothers, Ban Gu and Ban Chao, would also become important figures. She was educated at home by both her parents. This was unusual for a girl, even in a scholarly family. By her teens she was widely read in Chinese classics. At fourteen she married Cao Shishu, a local man. They had several children. Her husband died young. She did not remarry, which was already considered virtuous in her culture. Her father had been writing a major history of the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE to 23 CE). After his death, her brother Ban Gu took over the project. In 92 CE, Ban Gu was imprisoned because of court politics and died in prison. Around 97 CE, the emperor summoned Ban Zhao to the capital to finish her brother's work. She was given access to the Imperial Library, an extraordinary privilege for any scholar of her time. She completed the Book of Han (Han shu), one of the most important histories ever written in China. She also wrote Lessons for Women (Nüjie) and many other works. She tutored the empress and other women of the court. She died around 117 CE, aged about 70.

Anna Komnene was a Byzantine princess and historian. The Byzantine Empire was the eastern continuation of the Roman Empire. It survived for a thousand years after the western Roman Empire fell. Anna Komnene was born in the imperial palace in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in 1083. Her father was the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos. She is widely considered the first known woman historian in European tradition, though women had certainly written history elsewhere before her. She was the eldest child of the emperor. Her parents had her educated to a high level, unusual for a woman of her time. She studied Greek classics, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. She read Plato, Aristotle, the Greek tragedians, and the Bible. She knew the Byzantine intellectual traditions of her time deeply. When her younger brother John was born, the line of imperial succession changed. As the eldest, Anna had expected to be empress, with her husband as a kind of co-ruler. The arrival of a male heir reduced her position. According to some sources, she later plotted to put her own husband on the throne instead of her brother. The plot failed. She and her husband were exiled within Constantinople, kept under watch but not killed. After her husband's death in 1137, she retired to a monastery. There, in her sixties, she began writing the Alexiad. The book is a long history of her father's reign as emperor, from 1081 to 1118. It runs to over 500 pages in modern translations. The book is one of the great sources for the history of the First Crusade, the Byzantine Empire, and the politics of the eastern Mediterranean in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. She died around 1153, aged about 70.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a North African Muslim scholar, historian, and thinker. He was born in Tunis, in what is now Tunisia, to a family of scholars and officials. He lived through a turbulent period: the Black Death killed most of his family when he was seventeen, and he spent much of his life moving between the competing kingdoms of North Africa and Spain, working as a diplomat, judge, and official. In his early forties, he spent about four years in a small castle in what is now Algeria, largely cut off from political life. During this time he wrote the introduction to his great historical work, known as the Muqaddimah. This introduction is now recognised as one of the greatest works of social science ever written. He later moved to Egypt, where he worked as a judge and continued to write until his death in Cairo in 1406. He is considered one of the founders of sociology, historiography (the study of how history is written), and economics, though he lived five centuries before these disciplines were formally established in Europe.

Toussaint Louverture was the main leader of the Haitian Revolution. This was the only successful slave revolt in modern history. It turned a French slave colony into the first free Black republic in the world. He was born around 1743 on a sugar plantation called Bréda, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Today we call this country Haiti. His exact birth date is not known. His parents were enslaved people, probably brought from West Africa. Toussaint was born into slavery. But his life was unusual. His owner allowed him to learn to read and write. He studied French, some Latin, and medical herbs. By his fifties, he had been freed and owned a small coffee farm. He even owned a few enslaved people himself, which was common for free Black men at the time. This complicated background shaped his later choices. In 1791, a massive uprising began on the colony's northern plain. Enslaved people burned plantations and killed their owners. Toussaint joined the revolt but was not yet its leader. Over the next decade, through brilliant military campaigns, he rose to command. He defeated Spanish armies, British armies, and several French armies. He wrote a constitution for the colony in 1801 and made himself governor for life. In 1802, Napoleon sent a huge army to restore slavery. Toussaint was tricked into a meeting under a flag of truce and captured. He was shipped to France and locked in a freezing cell in the Jura mountains. He died there on 7 April 1803, cold and starving. But the revolution he had led did not die. The next year, his former generals defeated the French and declared Haitian independence on 1 January 1804.

Cyril Lionel Robert James was a Trinidadian historian, political thinker, novelist, and cricket writer. He is one of the most important intellectuals the Caribbean has produced. He was born on 4 January 1901 in Tunapuna, Trinidad, then a British colony. His father was a schoolteacher. His mother was a strong reader who filled the house with books. Young Cyril grew up reading English literature, the Bible, and Greek classics. He was also obsessed with cricket. These three loves, literature, politics, and cricket, stayed with him all his life. He won a scholarship to Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain, one of the best schools in Trinidad. He became a teacher, a cricketer, and a writer of short stories. In 1932, he sailed to England. In Lancashire, he lived with his friend Learie Constantine, the great West Indian cricketer. He wrote cricket reports for the Manchester Guardian. But he also became deeply involved in politics. He joined Trotskyist groups. He met African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta who were then studying in London. He helped build the movement for African independence from outside Africa. In 1938, he published The Black Jacobins, his masterpiece, a history of the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint Louverture. That same year he moved to the United States. He lived there for fifteen years, writing, teaching, and working with labour movements. In 1953, he was arrested during the anti-communist scare and held on Ellis Island. He was eventually deported. He returned to Trinidad in the late 1950s to support his former student Eric Williams, then leading the country toward independence. The two later fell out. James spent his final decades moving between England, Trinidad, the United States, and Africa. He died in London on 31 May 1989, aged 88. He had lived through almost the whole 20th century and written about most of it.

Eric Hobsbawm was a British historian and one of the most influential historians of the 20th century. He wrote about the rise of capitalism, the development of the modern world, and the major political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was a lifelong Marxist and Communist Party member. His writing was clear, ambitious, and read by both academics and general audiences. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917. He died in London in 2012, aged 95. He came from a Jewish family. His father was British. His mother was Austrian. He was born in Alexandria where his father worked. The family moved to Vienna, then to Berlin. Both his parents died young. He was orphaned by 14. An aunt brought him to England in 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany. His timing was lucky. The move to England saved his life. Most of his Central European Jewish family who stayed behind were eventually killed in the Holocaust. He studied history at Cambridge from 1936. He joined the Communist Party as a young man and remained a member for the rest of his life, despite the party's decline and the revelations of Stalin's crimes. He served in the British army during the Second World War. After the war, he became a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he taught for over 50 years. He wrote many books. His most famous are the four-volume series on the modern world: The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), The Age of Empire (1987), and The Age of Extremes (1994). Together these books cover European and world history from 1789 to 1991. He also wrote on bandits, on jazz, on nationalism, and on many other subjects. His autobiography Interesting Times came out in 2002. He continued writing into his nineties.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was an American historian, playwright, and activist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents who worked in factories, and grew up in poverty during the Great Depression. He served as a bombardier in the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War, an experience that turned him against the use of mass violence in war. After the war he studied history at Columbia University under the GI Bill and became a professor. He taught at Spelman College, a historically Black women's college in Atlanta, where he became deeply involved in the civil rights movement, before moving to Boston University. In 1980 he published A People's History of the United States, which retold American history from the perspectives of indigenous people, enslaved Africans, women, immigrants, and working people rather than from the perspective of political and military leaders. The book has sold over two million copies and has been continuously in print. He was also a prominent anti-war activist, opposing American involvement in Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War. He died in 2010 at the age of eighty-seven.

Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986) was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and political thinker — one of the most wide-ranging and controversial African intellectuals of the 20th century. Born in Diourbel, Senegal, he studied in Paris where he pursued doctorates in both physics and the humanities. His central intellectual project was to demonstrate that ancient Egypt was an African civilisation and that the origins of Greek philosophy, science, and culture lay substantially in Egypt — a claim that challenged the European history of civilisation that had been built on the assumption of African cultural inferiority. He founded the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, which bears his name. He was a pan-Africanist, a scientist, and a linguist as well as a historian.

E.P. Thompson (1924-1993) was a British historian, socialist activist, and peace campaigner. His full name was Edward Palmer Thompson. He was born in Oxford into a family with strong connections to India: his father had been a Methodist missionary and a friend of Rabindranath Tagore, and Thompson grew up with an internationalist outlook. He studied at Cambridge, served in the Second World War in Italy, and then worked as an adult education tutor for the Workers Educational Association in Yorkshire, teaching history to working-class communities. This experience of teaching history to people whose own ancestors rarely appeared in it profoundly shaped his work. He left the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956 following the Soviet invasion of Hungary and became one of the founders of the New Left in Britain. His monumental work The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963, transformed how historians thought about their subject. He was also a leading figure in the European Nuclear Disarmament movement in the 1980s. He died in 1993.

Natalie Zemon Davis (born 1928) is an American-Canadian historian. She was born in Detroit, Michigan, into a Jewish family, and studied history at Smith College, Radcliffe, and Michigan. She spent most of her academic career at Princeton University and the University of Toronto. In the 1950s she and her husband were investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, and she was unable to get an academic job for some years because of this. This experience of political persecution, and its arbitrariness, shaped her sensitivity to the experience of ordinary people navigating systems of power they could not control. She is best known for her books The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) and Women on the Margins (1995), but her broader contribution to historiography, how historians should do history, has been equally important. She brought together history and anthropology, paying close attention to how people at different times and places understood and narrated their own experiences, attending to the lives of women, artisans, Jews, and other marginal people who rarely appeared in conventional histories, and using close reading of documents to reconstruct the inner lives and cultural worlds of people who left few records. She has continued to work and teach into her nineties.

Walter Rodney (1942-1980) was a Guyanese historian, political thinker, and activist. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana, then a British colony in South America, and showed exceptional academic ability from childhood. He studied history at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and then completed a doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He taught at universities in Tanzania and Jamaica and became one of the most important historians of Africa and the African diaspora of his generation. He is best known for his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 1972, which showed systematically how African countries were made poor through centuries of colonial exploitation, not left poor through a lack of development. He was deeply committed to organising alongside working people and poor communities, not only writing about them. He was banned from Jamaica in 1968 for his political activities. He returned to Guyana in 1974 to work for political change there and was assassinated in 1980 at the age of thirty-eight. He died just months before elections that might have changed Guyanese politics.

Tony Judt was a British-American historian. He was one of the most important historians of postwar Europe and a sharp public intellectual. His massive 2005 book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 is widely considered one of the great works of modern historical writing. He was born in 1948 in London. He died in 2010 in New York, aged 62, from complications of motor neurone disease. He came from a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe. His parents were secular socialists. He grew up in north London. He studied history at King's College Cambridge from 1966. He spent time in Israel as a young man, where he worked on a kibbutz and briefly served in the Israeli army during the 1967 Six-Day War. The experience shaped him deeply. He returned home increasingly critical of Israeli policies, while remaining deeply engaged with Jewish history and identity. He earned his PhD in 1972. He taught at Cambridge and Oxford, then moved to the United States in 1987. He became professor of European history at New York University, where he taught for the rest of his career. In 1995 he founded the Remarque Institute at NYU for the study of Europe. He wrote across many fields: French intellectual history, postwar European history, contemporary politics, and questions of social democracy and political memory. He was politically a social democrat. He criticised both the radical left and the contemporary right. Some of his views, especially his strong criticism of Israeli policies and his 2003 essay calling for a binational state in Israel-Palestine, made him controversial. In 2008 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, also called ALS. The disease gradually paralysed him while leaving his mind intact. He continued writing through dictation. His final books, written as he was dying, are some of his most powerful. He died in 2010.

Timothy Snyder is an American historian. He is one of the most influential contemporary historians of Eastern Europe and 20th-century atrocity. He has also become a major public voice warning about threats to democracy in the United States and elsewhere. He was born in 1969 in Centerville, Ohio, in the American Midwest. He has spent most of his career as a professor at Yale University. He came from a non-academic family. His father was a veterinarian. He showed academic talent young. He studied history at Brown University, then at Oxford, where he earned his doctorate in 1997. His doctoral work was on Eastern European nationalism. He learned Polish, Ukrainian, German, French, Russian, Czech, Belarusian, and other languages over time. The linguistic range gave him access to sources most American historians cannot read directly. He joined the Yale faculty in 2001. His early academic books were specialised studies of Eastern European political history. They included The Reconstruction of Nations (2003) on Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian national identities, and Sketches from a Secret War (2005) on a Polish-Soviet conflict. In 2010 he published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. The book became a major international bestseller. It tells the story of the killings carried out by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia between 1933 and 1945 in the lands between Berlin and Moscow. About 14 million civilians were killed in this region by the two regimes. The book brought together histories that had usually been told separately. Since 2017, Snyder has become a leading public voice warning about threats to democracy. His 2017 short book On Tyranny became a global bestseller. He has spoken extensively about Russian aggression in Ukraine and about authoritarian movements in the United States and elsewhere. He continues teaching at Yale.