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Era
Countries (85)
30 figures
Phineas Quimby
1802 – 1866Clockmaker turned mental healer whose notebooks seeded the entire New Thought movement.
Warren Felt Evans
1817 – 1889Swedenborgian minister who wrote the first systematic books of mental-cure philosophy.
Frederick Douglass
1818 – 1895His Narrative was abolition's most powerful weapon.
Walt Whitman
1819 – 1892Leaves of Grass invented American poetic voice.
Emily Dickinson
1830 – 18861,800 poems found in a drawer redefined lyric compression.
Prentice Mulford
1834 – 1891Essayist who popularised 'thoughts are things' and the idea of mental forces.
Andrew Carnegie
1835 – 1919Built modern steel and then invented large-scale philanthropy.
William James
1842 – 1910Founded American psychology and, with Peirce, pragmatism; studied New Thought as 'mind-cure'.
Myrtle Fillmore
1845 – 1931Her recovery from tuberculosis through affirmative prayer began the Unity movement.
Thomas Edison
1847 – 19311,093 patents and the industrial research laboratory itself.
Emma Curtis Hopkins
1849 – 1925The 'teacher of teachers' who trained the founders of Unity, Divine Science and Religious Science.
Charles Fillmore
1854 – 1948Co-founded Unity with Myrtle Fillmore in 1889; built its prayer ministry and publishing house.
Frederick Winslow Taylor
1856 – 1915Scientific management — the origin of every productivity metric and its discontents.
John Dewey
1859 – 1952Pragmatist whose learning-by-doing reshaped schools on every continent.
Wallace Wattles
1860 – 1911The Science of Getting Rich turned New Thought toward prosperity and later inspired The Secret.
Nona Brooks
1861 – 1945Co-founded Divine Science and its Denver college of practitioners.
William Walker Atkinson
1862 – 1932Prolific author who named the law of attraction and wrote as Yogi Ramacharaka.
Henry Ford
1863 – 1947The moving assembly line and the five-dollar day created mass consumer industry.
George Washington Carver
1864 – 1943Crop rotation and peanut science that rescued Southern soil and farmers.
Madam C. J. Walker
1867 – 1919Built a national cosmetics company and became America's first self-made Black woman millionaire.
W. E. B. Du Bois
1868 – 1963The Souls of Black Folk and the concept of double consciousness.
Florence Scovel Shinn
1871 – 1940Illustrator turned teacher whose parables made affirmation practice everyday.
Benedict Lust
1872 – 1945German émigré who founded American naturopathy and its first college in 1902.
Napoleon Hill
1883 – 1970Think and Grow Rich carried New Thought into business self-help; his sourcing remains disputed.
Ernest Holmes
1887 – 1960Founded Religious Science and wrote The Science of Mind, its systematic textbook.
Roger J. Williams
1893 – 1988Discovered pantothenic acid and argued for biochemical individuality — the idea beneath functional medicine.
William Faulkner
1897 – 1962Built Yoknapatawpha County and the Southern conscience.
Norman Vincent Peale
1898 – 1993The Power of Positive Thinking sold tens of millions and mainstreamed the movement.
Ernest Hemingway
1899 – 1961Stripped English prose to the bone.
W. Edwards Deming
1900 – 1993Statistical quality control rebuilt Japanese manufacturing and then global industry.