100 People Who Influenced the World

Author: Deng Shusheng / Zhang Xiuping / Yang Huimei (editors)
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2004-05-01
Features: "The outside world is wonderful." This is a popular saying in Chinese society after the reform and opening-up. Its meaning is not only to express the desire to travel and explore outside but also, on a deeper level, a yearning and pursuit to understand the world. In reality, being blind to the outside world and ignorant of the broader picture has been criticized. The Ming scholar Wang Fuzhi sighed after reading history: "If one's ears are limited to what they hear, they lose their natural wisdom; if one's eyes are limited to what they see, they lose their natural clarity." The era of closing doors to live out one's days has long passed. The purpose of the "World 100 Series" is to make an effort to help readers understand the outside world. Taking the major events that have influenced the world, wars, figures, works, and cultures as the framework, it outlines a rough picture of the development of human history. The development of human history is a long and complex process of negating oneself, overcoming oneself, and gradually improving oneself. How many figures have played both positive and negative roles on the stage of world history? How many major events, both accidental and inevitable, have occurred in the long river of history? How many wars that have pushed forward or hindered historical development can be recorded in books? How many chapters of books that have survived disasters can be counted? How can the colorful and diverse ancient and modern civilizations of humanity be encompassed by artificially dividing them into several forms? The "World 100 Series" is inevitably incomplete with its fixed number of 100. It is like picking grains from the vast ocean, and it is also limited by the length of the books. The five books included in the series—The 100 People Who Influenced the World, The 100 Events That Influenced the World, The 100 Wars That Influenced the World, The 100 Books That Influenced the World, and The 100 Cultures That Influenced the World—can only select 100 relevant topics from foreign perspectives that have influenced the world, with each article being around 3,000 words. Each book is over 300,000 words, and the five books together total over 1.5 to 1.6 million words. Although not a massive work, it is still quite substantial. The 100 People Who Influenced the World includes over 40 famous politicians and military leaders from ancient to modern times, from the Roman Caesar to the modern president of South Africa, Mandela; over 30 academic giants and scientists, from Plato in ancient Greece to Einstein in the modern era; over 10 revolutionary leaders, religious figures, saints, and reformers; literary and artistic masters such as Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Beethoven, and Picasso; and folk heroes like Spartacus and Joan of Arc. Fewer figures are included in the literary and artistic category because in The 100 Books That Influenced the World, 26 writers are reviewed, and to avoid excessive repetition, only some artists like Leonardo da Vinci are highlighted.