Category
An African man who arrived in Japan in 1579 and became a retainer of Oda Nobunaga, the warlord who did most to unify the country — the only person of African origin known to have held such a position
A Soviet botanist and geneticist who assembled the world's first great seed bank to secure food supplies against famine, and who died of starvation in a Soviet prison in 1943 — a fate that is among
A Soviet air defence officer who, on 26 September 1983, decided that his early warning system's report of an incoming American nuclear attack was a false alarm — and did not pass it up the chain of
An American scientist and campaigner who, in 1856, demonstrated experimentally that carbon dioxide traps heat — three years before the work usually credited with founding climate science, and then
The astrophysicist who discovered pulsars in 1967 as a graduate student, and who was excluded from the Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery — a case that became a reference point in debates about
A twelfth-century German abbess, composer, writer, natural philosopher and political correspondent — one of the few medieval women whose work survives in substantial quantity, and whose range is
The naturalist who independently arrived at the theory of evolution by natural selection, prompting Darwin to publish — and who is a striking example of how scientific credit attaches to circumstance
Almost certainly not. The claim originates in hostile propaganda written decades after her execution, and nothing in the contemporary record supports it — which makes it a useful case study in how
He was genuinely formidable and the reputation was written almost entirely by his enemies — and the most striking fact about him is how little he actually destroyed relative to the terror he
No. The image of a single catastrophic night in which ancient knowledge was lost is a much later construction — the library declined over centuries through funding cuts, political neglect and the
The military and political leader central to the independence of six South American countries from Spanish rule — and a figure whose legacy is claimed by political movements with almost nothing in
A Mesopotamian priestess and poet of the twenty-third century BCE, and the earliest author whose name is attached to their own writing — a claim that predates Homer by well over a millennium. Who she
An English writer and philosopher whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a foundational text of feminist political thought — and whose reputation was destroyed for a century by her
A Serbian-American engineer whose real contributions are substantial and are routinely buried beneath claims he never made — the internet-era Tesla is a character partly invented after his death.
The only woman in Chinese history to rule in her own name as emperor, founding her own dynasty in 690 — and one of the clearest cases of a ruler whose reputation was written by people with a strong
Probably not. The snake story is ancient, dramatic and poorly supported — most modern historians consider poison the more likely method, and some consider murder a genuine possibility. Where the
An eleventh-century scholar whose work on optics overturned the accepted theory of vision and who is described by many historians as having practised something close to the modern scientific method
An Italian Renaissance painter who achieved international renown in her own lifetime, served as a court painter in Spain, and was largely written out of the record afterwards — a pattern common
The conquests were genuinely catastrophic in scale, and the reputation is also shaped substantially by the people he defeated writing the histories — the truth involves both extraordinary violence
The engineer who built London's sewer system in the 1860s and 70s, ending the cholera epidemics that had killed tens of thousands — and who is a rare case of an infrastructure project deliberately
A French natural philosopher and mathematician of the early eighteenth century whose translation and commentary on Newton's Principia remains the standard French edition — and whose own work on
The geochemist who established the age of the Earth and then spent decades fighting the lead industry to get lead out of petrol — a career that is one of the clearest illustrations of how
An American agronomist whose wheat breeding is credited with averting famine across South Asia and Latin America — plausibly having saved more lives than any other individual, and almost unknown
A German chemist whose work both feeds much of the world and killed on an industrial scale — arguably the most morally difficult figure in the history of science, and a useful corrective to the idea