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← Fame through time1870-1879

The 1870s

Whose names filled the books of the 1870s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.

Talked about then

Whose names appeared most in Chinese books during the 1870s, whenever they lived.

Lived then

The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1870s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.

  1. 1Friedrich Nietzsche1844-1900 · Germany · Academics15 decades
  2. 2Mark Twain1835-1910 · United States · Writers16 decades
  3. 3Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky1840-1893 · Russia · Musicians10 decades
  4. 4William McKinley1843-1901 · United States · Politicians16 decades
  5. 5Grover Cleveland1837-1908 · United States · Politicians14 decades
  6. 6Claude Monet1840-1926 · France · Artists14 decades
  7. 7Émile Zola1840-1902 · France · Writers16 decades
  8. 8Edward VII1841-1910 · United Kingdom · Historical Figures13 decades
  9. 9Sarah Bernhardt1844-1923 · France · Actors15 decades
  10. 10John D. Rockefeller1839-1937 · United States · Founders14 decades
  11. 11Andrew Carnegie1835-1919 · United States · Founders14 decades
  12. 12Leopold II of Belgium1835-1909 · Belgium · Historical Figures9 decades
  13. 13Paul Cézanne1839-1906 · France · Artists12 decades
  14. 14Pope Pius X1835-1914 · Italy · Religious Figures12 decades
  15. 15Antonín Dvořák1841-1904 · Musicians0 decades
  16. 16Empress Elisabeth of Austria1837-1898 · Germany · Historical Figures0 decades
  17. 17Empress Dowager Cixi1835-1908 · China · Historical Figures5 decades
  18. 18Pierre-Auguste Renoir1841-1919 · France · Artists12 decades
  19. 19Thomas Hardy1840-1928 · United Kingdom · Writers18 decades
  20. 20Abdul Hamid II1842-1918 · Turkey · Historical Figures13 decades
  21. 21J. P. Morgan1837-1913 · United States · Founders16 decades
  22. 22Auguste Rodin1840-1917 · France · Artists14 decades
  23. 23Henry James1843-1916 · United States · Writers18 decades
  24. 24Ramakrishna1836-1886 · India · Academics14 decades
  25. 25Peter Kropotkin1842-1921 · Russia · Activists11 decades
Show 75 more

How to read these rankings

  • Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
  • Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
  • Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.