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11 figures

Phineas Quimby

1802 – 1866

Clockmaker turned mental healer whose notebooks seeded the entire New Thought movement.

United States·New Thought · Philosophy

Warren Felt Evans

1817 – 1889

Swedenborgian minister who wrote the first systematic books of mental-cure philosophy.

United States·New Thought · Philosophy

Frederick Douglass

1818 – 1895

His Narrative was abolition's most powerful weapon.

United States·Literature · Philosophy

William James

1842 – 1910

Founded American psychology and, with Peirce, pragmatism; studied New Thought as 'mind-cure'.

United States·Philosophy · Psychology

John Dewey

1859 – 1952

Pragmatist whose learning-by-doing reshaped schools on every continent.

United States·Philosophy · Education

W. E. B. Du Bois

1868 – 1963

The Souls of Black Folk and the concept of double consciousness.

United States·Philosophy · History · Literature

Ernest Holmes

1887 – 1960

Founded Religious Science and wrote The Science of Mind, its systematic textbook.

United States·New Thought · Philosophy

John Rawls

1921 – 2002

A Theory of Justice: fairness derived from behind the veil of ignorance.

United States·Philosophy · Law

Martin Luther King Jr.

1929 – 1968

Letter from Birmingham Jail and a movement that rewrote American law.

United States·Peace · Philosophy · LiteratureNobel

Martha Nussbaum

b. 1947

Capabilities approach to justice, and a defence of emotion in public reason.

United States·Philosophy · Human Rights

David Frawley

b. 1950

Vedic scholar whose texts linked Ayurveda, yoga and jyotish for Western students.

United States·Ayurveda · Philosophy