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The nun who argued for women's right to learn — and was silenced for it.

Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.

Designed American public credit, the national bank and industrial policy.

Led six nations to independence and drafted their founding constitutions.

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

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

His Narrative was abolition's most powerful weapon.

Leaves of Grass invented American poetic voice.

1,800 poems found in a drawer redefined lyric compression.

Identified the mosquito as the vector of yellow fever.

Essayist who popularised 'thoughts are things' and the idea of mental forces.

Built modern steel and then invented large-scale philanthropy.

Wrote a novel narrated by a dead man in 1881; Brazil's greatest writer.

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

Her recovery from tuberculosis through affirmative prayer began the Unity movement.

1,093 patents and the industrial research laboratory itself.

The 'teacher of teachers' who trained the founders of Unity, Divine Science and Religious Science.

Poet-revolutionary whose essays founded Cuban and pan-American thought.

Co-founded Unity with Myrtle Fillmore in 1889; built its prayer ministry and publishing house.

Scientific management — the origin of every productivity metric and its discontents.

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

The Science of Getting Rich turned New Thought toward prosperity and later inspired The Secret.

Co-founded Divine Science and its Denver college of practitioners.

Prolific author who named the law of attraction and wrote as Yogi Ramacharaka.

The moving assembly line and the five-dollar day created mass consumer industry.

Crop rotation and peanut science that rescued Southern soil and farmers.

Built a national cosmetics company and became America's first self-made Black woman millionaire.

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

Dentist whose global survey of traditional diets tied refined food to physical degeneration.

Illustrator turned teacher whose parables made affirmation practice everyday.

Eradicated yellow fever from Rio and founded Brazilian public health.

German émigré who founded American naturopathy and its first college in 1902.

Flew the first publicly witnessed powered aircraft in Europe.

Described a disease, its parasite and its vector single-handedly.

Think and Grow Rich carried New Thought into business self-help; his sourcing remains disputed.

First Latin American science laureate; pituitary role in glucose metabolism.

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

First Latin American to win the literature Nobel; teacher and diplomat.

Co-discovered insulin and sold the patent for one dollar.

Discovered pantothenic acid and argued for biochemical individuality — the idea beneath functional medicine.

Built Yoknapatawpha County and the Southern conscience.

The Power of Positive Thinking sold tens of millions and mainstreamed the movement.

Stripped English prose to the bone.

Invented the labyrinth-library imagination that prefigured hypertext.

El Señor Presidente invented the Latin American dictator novel.

Statistical quality control rebuilt Japanese manufacturing and then global industry.

Centre-periphery theory drove Latin American development strategy for decades.

Discovered jumping genes decades before the field caught up.

Canto General and the love poems memorised across a continent.

The Seven Countries Study put diet at the centre of cardiovascular prevention.

Taught imagination as the sole creative power; 'assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled'.

Built the first compiler and made programming languages English-like.

Silent Spring launched the environmental movement and got DDT banned.

Monetarism, floating exchange rates and a generation of deregulation.

Polio vaccine, unpatented — 'could you patent the sun?'

The Labyrinth of Solitude defined Mexican self-understanding.

Co-authored the monetary history that reshaped central banking doctrine.

Mathematised economics and wrote the textbook that taught the postwar world.

Information theory: the bit, and the mathematics of all digital communication.

Ran the first double-blind trials in psychiatry and founded orthomolecular medicine with high-dose niacin.

Menninger researcher who founded clinical biofeedback and self-regulation therapy.

QED, nanotechnology's founding lecture, and the Challenger diagnosis.

Mapped the ocean floor and proved continental drift.

Interior, philosophical fiction now a global cult.

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

Pedagogy of the Oppressed rewrote literacy teaching for the global south.

The Fire Next Time; the most precise prose on American race ever written.

Her arrest and trial in California led directly to acupuncture's legalisation in the state.

You Can Heal Your Life and Hay House globalised affirmation culture; its health claims are contested.

Made the impossible ordinary and gave Latin America its own way of telling time.

Monoclonal antibodies — now a $200bn class of medicines.

Unity minister whose prosperity books shaped late-century abundance teaching.

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

Omeros transplanted Homer to the Caribbean.

Theorised 'nation language' and Caribbean creolisation.

Wrote Black American interior life without explaining it to anyone.

Made the short story carry the weight of novels.

A House for Mr Biswas and a contested postcolonial vision.

Showed communities can govern shared resources without markets or states.

Co-led the Adverse Childhood Experiences study linking childhood trauma to lifelong disease.

Documented the relaxation response at Harvard and made mind-body medicine measurable.

Anatomies of power across the Andes and the Caribbean.

Framed clinical practice around the tack rule — take out what harms, put in what's missing.

Built The Healer's Art curriculum, taught in medical schools on four continents.

The Handmaid's Tale became the global shorthand for reproductive coercion.

Brokered peace across five Central American wars.

Open Veins of Latin America reframed a hemisphere's economic history.

First songwriter awarded the literature Nobel.

Founded the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and trained a generation of fellows.

Proved CFCs destroy ozone; his work produced the Montreal Protocol.

Created Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in 1979; now standard in clinics worldwide.

Physician of addiction and trauma; reframed illness as a response to lived adversity.

Coined and codified functional medicine; founded the Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991.

Discovered the opiate receptor and argued the body is a single emotional-molecular network.

Wrote The Web That Has No Weaver, then founded Harvard's programme in placebo studies.

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

Co-founded Bastyr University, the first accredited natural-medicine university in the United States.

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

Ended a 52-year civil war by negotiated accord.

Proved lifestyle change can reverse coronary artery disease; first such programme reimbursed by Medicare.

First Westerner to earn India's BAMS degree and license; interpreter of Ayurveda for the West.

Neurologist who put diet, glycemia and the microbiome at the centre of brain health.

Reversed her own progressive MS disability with a mitochondrial-nutrition protocol, then trialled it.

His 1993 survey of unconventional therapy use forced US medicine to take the field seriously.

Directed the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine and built the evidence agenda for whole-person care.

Founded Agape International and carried New Thought to a global multiracial audience.

Co-discovered nucleoside-modified mRNA.

Indigenous rights advocate whose testimonio reached the world.

Took functional medicine mainstream through the Cleveland Clinic Center and a run of bestsellers.

Herbalist-physician who shaped US botanical-medicine standards and education.

CRISPR gene editing, now in approved sickle-cell therapy.