PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: nationalism
Indian social activist, lawyer, and politician
Mahatma Gandhi was an Indian lawyer, politician, social activist, and writer who became the leader of the Indian Independence Movement against British rule. As such, he came to be considered “the father...
dictator of Germany
Adolf Hitler was the leader of the Nazi Party (from 1920/21) and chancellor (Kanzler) and Führer of Germany (1933–45). His worldview revolved around two concepts: territorial expansion and racial supremacy....
Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini was the Italian prime minister (1922–43) and the first of 20th-century Europe’s fascist dictators. Mussolini was the first child of the local blacksmith. In later years he expressed pride...
Former president of Brazil
Jair Bolsonaro is a Brazilian politician who served as president of Brazil from 2019 to 2023. A right-wing nationalist, law-and-order advocate, and former army captain who expressed admiration for the...
president of Palestinian Authority
Yasser Arafat was the president (1996–2004) of the Palestinian Authority (PA), chairman (1969–2004) of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and leader of Fatah, the largest of the constituent PLO...
Italian revolutionary
Giuseppe Garibaldi was an Italian patriot and soldier of the Risorgimento, a republican who, through his conquest of Sicily and Naples with his guerrilla Redshirts, contributed to the achievement of Italian...
Piedmontese statesman
Camillo Benso, count di Cavour was a Piedmontese statesman, a conservative whose exploitation of international rivalries and of revolutionary movements brought about the unification of Italy (1861) under...
Chinese leader
Sun Yat-sen was the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang [Pinyin: Guomindang]), known as the father of modern China. Influential in overthrowing the Qing (Manchu) dynasty (1911/12), he served...
Italian revolutionary
Giuseppe Mazzini was a Genoese propagandist and revolutionary, founder of the secret revolutionary society Young Italy (1832), and a champion of the movement for Italian unity known as the Risorgimento....
Métis leader
Gabriel Dumont was a Métis leader who rose to political prominence in an age of declining buffalo herds and was concerned about the ongoing economic prosperity and political independence of his people....
Palestinian politician
Yahya Sinwar was the de facto leader of Hamas from 2017 to 2024 and the de jure leader as head of its political bureau from August 2024 to October 2024. Sinwar was an early architect of Hamas’s armed wing...
Hungarian political leader
Lajos Kossuth was a political reformer who inspired and led Hungary’s struggle for independence from Austria. His brief period of power in the revolutionary years of 1848 and 1849, however, was ended by...
Scottish politician
Alex Salmond was a Scottish politician who served in the British House of Commons (1987–2010 and 2015–17) and who was the first minister of Scotland (2007–14). Salmond studied economics at the University...
Irish leader
Charles Stewart Parnell was an Irish Nationalist, member of the British Parliament (1875–91), and the leader of the struggle for Irish Home Rule in the late 19th century. In 1889–90 he was ruined by proof...
Austrian Zionist leader
Theodor Herzl was the founder of the political form of Zionism, a movement to establish a Jewish homeland. His pamphlet The Jewish State (1896) proposed that the Jewish question was a political question...
Haitian leader
Toussaint Louverture was a leader of the Haitian independence movement during the French Revolutionary era (1787–99), part of the broader wave of Atlantic revolutions that reshaped political authority...
prime minister of Israel
David Ben-Gurion was a Zionist statesman and political leader, the first prime minister (1948–53, 1955–63) and defense minister (1948–53; 1955–63) of Israel. It was Ben-Gurion who, on May 14, 1948, at...
president of Indonesia
Sukarno was the leader of the Indonesian independence movement and Indonesia’s first president (1949–66), who suppressed the country’s original parliamentary system in favour of an authoritarian “Guided...
prime minister of Serbia
Nikola Pašić was the prime minister of Serbia (1891–92, 1904–05, 1906–08, 1909–11, 1912–18) and prime minister of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (1918, 1921–24, 1924–26). He was one of the...
Polish revolutionary and statesman
Józef Piłsudski was a Polish revolutionary and statesman, the first chief of state (1918–22) of the newly independent Poland established in November 1918. After leading a coup d’état in 1926, he rejected...
Algerian leader
Abdelkader was the amīr of Mascara (from 1832), the military and religious leader who founded the Algerian state and led the Algerians in their 19th-century struggle against French domination (1840–46)....
Palestinian politician
Khaled Meshaal is an exiled Palestinian politician who served as the head of the political bureau of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas from 1996 until 2017. In 2021 he was tapped to head Hamas’s...
Israeli president and scientist
Chaim Weizmann was the first president of the new nation of Israel (1949–52), who was for decades the guiding spirit behind the World Zionist Organization. Chaim Azriel Weizmann was born of humble parents...
president of Yugoslavia
Slobodan Milošević was a politician and administrator, who, as Serbia’s party leader and president (1989–97), pursued Serbian nationalist policies that contributed to the breakup of the socialist Yugoslav...
president of Namibia
Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah is a politician who became the president of Namibia in March 2025 after having won the country’s November 2024 presidential election. She is the first woman to serve as Namibia’s...
Father of Adolf Hitler
Among the millions of words written about Adolf Hitler, very few words have been dedicated to his father, Alois Hitler. Some of the most telling, however, were penned by his son, writing in Mein Kampf...
Irish politician and patriot
Eamon de Valera was an Irish politician and patriot who served as taoiseach (prime minister; 1932–48, 1951–54, 1957–59) and president (1959–73) of Ireland. An active revolutionary from 1913, he became...
Chilean head of state
Bernardo O’Higgins was a South American revolutionary leader and the first Chilean head of state (“supreme director,” 1817–23), who commanded the military forces that won independence from Spain. Bernardo...
prime minister of Greece
Eleuthérios Venizélos was the prime minister of Greece (1910–15, 1917–20, 1924, 1928–32, 1933), the most prominent Greek politician and statesman of the early 20th century. Under his leadership Greece...
president of Czechoslovakia
Tomáš Masaryk was the chief founder and first president (1918–35) of Czechoslovakia. Masaryk’s father was a Slovak coachman; his mother, a maid, came from a Germanized Moravian family. Though he was trained...
president of Indonesia
Suharto was an army officer and political leader who was president of Indonesia from 1967 to 1998. His three decades of uninterrupted rule gave Indonesia much-needed political stability and sustained economic...
prime minister of Poland
Jarosław Kaczyński is a Polish politician who served as prime minister of Poland (2006–07) and later as deputy prime minister (2020– ). Jarosław and his identical twin, Lech, first came to the attention...
Indian Hindu nationalist ideologue
M.S. Golwalkar was an Indian Hindu nationalist leader who served as the second sarsanghchalak (“chief leader of the organization”) of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS; “National Volunteer Organization”)...
prime minister of Palestinian Authority
Ismail Haniyeh was a Palestinian politician and Hamas leader who served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 2006–07, after Hamas won a majority of seats in the 2006 Palestinian legislative...
president of Angola
João Lourenço is an Angolan politician and, since 2017, the president of Angola. He has been a longtime member of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola;...
Russian politician
Vladimir Zhirinovsky was a Russian politician and leader of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) from 1991 to 2022. Known for his fiery Russian nationalism and broad anti-Semitic asides,...
Indian physician, nationalist, and social organizer
K.B. Hedgewar was an Indian physician, nationalist, and social organizer who founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS; Hindi: “National Volunteer Organization”) in 1925 in Nagpur, Central Provinces...
Nigerian statesman
Obafemi Awolowo was a Nigerian statesman who was a strong and influential advocate of independence, nationalism, and federalism. He was also known for his progressive views concerning social welfare. Awolowo...
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader
Abdullah Öcalan is the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militant Kurdish nationalist organization, who became widely known as the strongest advocate for Kurdish sovereignty. As the PKK’s...
king of Naples
Joachim Murat was a French cavalry leader who was one of Napoleon’s most celebrated marshals and who, as king of Naples (1808–15), lent stimulus to Italian nationalism. The son of an innkeeper, he studied...
Indian writer and politician
Lajpat Rai was an Indian writer and politician, outspoken in his advocacy of a militant anti-British nationalism in the Indian National Congress (Congress Party), and one of the “Lal Bal Pal” trio, along...
Hungarian statesman
Ferenc Deák was a Hungarian statesman whose negotiations led to the establishment of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867. Deák was the son of a wealthy Hungarian landowner. After graduating in...
American journalist and writer
Agnes Smedley was a journalist and writer best known for a series of articles and books centred on her experiences in China during the growth of Chinese communism. Smedley grew up under straitened circumstances....
president of Ireland
William Thomas Cosgrave was an Irish statesman, who was the first president of the Executive Council (prime minister; 1922–32) of the Irish Free State. At an early age, Cosgrave was attracted to the Irish...
president of Poland
Lech Kaczyński was a politician who served as president of Poland (2005–10). Kaczyński and his identical twin, Jarosław, were sons of Rajmund Kaczyński, a soldier who fought the German occupation of Poland,...
Anglo-Irish countess and political activist
Constance Markievicz was an Anglo-Irish countess and political activist who was the first woman elected to the British Parliament (1918), though she refused to take her seat. She was also the only woman...
prime minister of Israel
Golda Meir was an Israeli politician who helped found (1948) the State of Israel and later served as its fourth prime minister (1969–74). She was the first woman to hold the post. In 1906 Goldie Mabovitch’s...
Italian statesman
Francesco Crispi was an Italian statesman who, after being exiled from Naples and Sardinia-Piedmont for revolutionary activities, eventually became premier of a united Italy. Crispi grew up in Sicily,...
Slovak priest and politician
Andrej Hlinka was a Slovak Roman Catholic priest who sought Slovak independence and, as the leader of the Slovak People’s Party, opposed the centralizing efforts of Czechoslovakia’s government during the...
Puerto Rican attorney, social activist, and nationalist
Pedro Albizu Campos was a Puerto Rican attorney, social activist, and nationalist. Albizu Campos was the son of a mixed-race mother who was the daughter of slaves and a Basque father from a farming and...
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