← Fame through time1928
1928
Whose working lives fell in 1928. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in 1928, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Mao Zedong13 decades - 2
Hermann Göring9 decades - 3
Joachim von Ribbentrop9 decades - 4
Mae West10 decades - 5
Vladimir Mayakovsky11 decades - 6
Joan Miró9 decades - 7
Alfred Rosenberg10 decades - 8
Walter Ulbricht9 decades - 9
Lillian Gish10 decades - 10
Ip Mannot measured- - 11
Mikhail Tukhachevsky7 decades - 12
Paramahansa Yogananda6 decades - 13
Omar Bradley8 decades - 14
Hattie McDaniel5 decades - 15
Edward G. Robinson9 decades - 16
Soong Ching-ling10 decades - 17
Dorothy Parker10 decades - 18
Lazar Kaganovich7 decades - 19
Harold Lloyd10 decades - 20
Roland Freislernot measured- - 21
Leslie Howardnot measured- - 22
Allen Dullesnot measured- - 23
Carol II of Romanianot measured- - 24
Palmiro Togliatti8 decades - 25
Jomo Kenyatta7 decades
How to read these rankings
- People sit in their own time. Everyone is placed in the century their working life belongs to, and never in one that came after their death.
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record, read across every language rather than one. 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. Those decades are closed, so each curve is measured once and kept.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, or a name belongs to more than one notable person, we would rather show nothing than guess.