Mao Zedong (help·info) (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976) (also Mao Tse-Tung in Wade-Giles transliteration) was a Chinese Marxist theorist, soldier, and statesman who led China's communist revolution after decades of foreign occupation and civil war in the 20th century. Following the Communist Party of China’s military victory over the nationalist Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War, Mao announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, in the culturally-sign

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José Rizal was born into a prosperous middle class Filipino and Chinese-mestizo family in the town of Calamba in the Province of Laguna. His parents were Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonzo. He was the seventh child of their eleven children. Dominican friar landlords granted the family the privilege of the lease of a hacienda and an accompanying rice farm, but contentious litigation followed the friars' attempts to raise tenant rental fees, which the farmers, led by Rizal, disputed while expos

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He was born Napoleone di Buonaparte (in Corsican, Nabolione or Nabulione) in the town of Ajaccio on Corsica on 15 August 1769, only one year after the island was transferred to France by the Republic of Genoa. He later adopted the more French-sounding Napoléon Bonaparte. His family was minor Italian nobility living in Corsica. His father, Carlo Buonaparte, an attorney, was named Corsica's representative to the court of Louis XVI of France in 1778, where he remained for a number of years. The do

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Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883, London) was an immensely influential German philosopher, political economist, and socialist revolutionary. While Marx addressed a wide range of issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of class struggles, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Along with Engels, Marx took part in the polit

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [ˈgeːɔrk ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈfriːdrɪç ˈheːgəl] (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. His influence has been widespread on writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (F. H. Bradley, Sartre, Hans Küng, Bruno Bauer), and his detractors (Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Schelling). He is also known for at

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