Curated playlist
19th-century atheists
- Friedrich NietzscheFriedrich Nietzsche's sister edited his writings to fit her own ultranationalist views.
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyPoet Percy Bysshe Shelley's body was identified partly by a copy of Keats's Lamia in his jacket.
- Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf's father let her read whatever she liked in his vast library.
- Karl MarxKarl Marx left an estate valued at just 250 pounds when he died in 1883. He died stateless in London at 64.
- Friedrich EngelsFriedrich Engels rode with an aristocratic fox hunt while funding Karl Marx.
- Arthur SchopenhauerArthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher who, in 1820, asked the University of Berlin to schedule his lectures for the very hour when Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel taught. Hegel was the celebrated name of the day. Only five students…
- Vladimir LeninLenin's name came from no person, and the N in N. Lenin stood for nothing. One theory points to the Lena River.
- Mikhail BakuninKarl Marx had the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin expelled from the First International in 1872.
- Vissarion BelinskyRussian critic Vissarion Belinsky died in 1848, just before the Tsar's police could arrest him.
- Henry Stephens SaltHenry Salt's essay on vegetarianism, found in a London restaurant, changed why Gandhi ate as he did.
- Jeremy BenthamJeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, jurist and social reformer who lived from 1748 to 1832, is on public display at the entrance of the Student Centre at University College London. Visitors find a seated figure in a glass case,…
- Peter KropotkinAnarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin refused a cabinet seat in Russia's Provisional Government.
- Bertrand RussellAt 89, philosopher Bertrand Russell went to jail for an anti-nuclear protest. Asked to behave, he said, "No, I won't."
- Vinayak Damodar SavarkarVinayak Savarkar jumped from a ship's window at Marseille and swam to shore.
- Max StirnerMax Stirner was born Johann Caspar Schmidt, and the name history remembers began as a joke about the size of his forehead. He later adopted that nickname as his pen name, and it outlasted the man himself. Almost everything we know about…
- Jane Ellen HarrisonA lecture on Athenian gravestones in Glasgow drew 1,600 people. The speaker was classicist Jane Ellen Harrison.
- Harriet MartineauAfter her family's textile business failed in 1829, Harriet Martineau wrote to earn a living.
- John DeweyJohn Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, and over his lifetime he published more than 700 articles in 140 journals and roughly 40 books. In 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, he wrote a line that would organize all that…