PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: president
president of Uzbekistan
Shavkat Mirziyoyev is an Uzbek politician who served as Uzbekistan’s prime minister (2003–16) and president (2016– ). A younger protégé of the repressive president Islam Karimov (1991–2016), he became...
Nigerian entrepreneur and politician
Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola was a Nigerian business executive, philanthropist, and politician who is hailed as a figure of democratic change in Nigeria. Abiola was born and raised in poverty but was...
45th and 47th president of the United States
Donald Trump is a former real estate mogul and reality TV star who has served as the 45th and 47th president of the United States. The scion of renowned New York real estate developer Fred Trump, Donald...
44th president of the United States
Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States (2009–17) and the first African American to hold the office. Before winning the presidency, Obama represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate (2005–08)....
16th president of the United States
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States (1861–65), who preserved the Union during the American Civil War and brought about the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States....
1st president of the United States
George Washington was an American general and commander in chief of the colonial armies in the American Revolution (1775–83) and subsequently first president of the United States (1789–97). Washington’s...
3rd president of the United States
Thomas Jefferson was the draftsman of the Declaration of Independence of the United States and the nation’s first secretary of state (1789–94) and second vice president (1797–1801) and, as the third president...
43rd president of the United States
George W. Bush is the 43rd president of the United States (2001–09), who led his country’s response to the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and initiated the Iraq War in 2003. Narrowly winning the...
president of Venezuela
Nicolás Maduro is a Venezuelan leader who won the special election held in April 2013 to choose a replacement to serve out the remainder of the term of Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez, who had died in March....
president of Russia
Vladimir Putin is a Russian intelligence officer and politician who has served as president (1999–2008 and 2012– ) of Russia and as the country’s prime minister (1999 and 2008–12). One of the 21st century’s...
32nd president of the United States
Franklin D. Roosevelt was the 32nd president of the United States (1933–45). The only president elected to the office four times, Roosevelt led the United States through two of the greatest crises of the...
40th president of the United States
Ronald Reagan was the 40th president of the United States (1981–89), noted for his conservative Republicanism, his fervent anticommunism, and his appealing personal style, characterized by a jaunty affability...
president of Turkey
Kemal Atatürk was a soldier, statesman, and reformer who was the founder and first president (1923–38) of the Republic of Turkey. He modernized the country’s legal and educational systems and encouraged...
president of Ukraine
Volodymyr Zelensky is a Ukrainian actor and comedian who was elected president of Ukraine in 2019. Although he was a political novice, Zelensky’s anti-corruption platform won him widespread support, and...
46th president of the United States
Joe Biden is the 46th president of the United States (2021–25) and was the 47th vice president of the United States (2009–17) in the Democratic administration of Pres. Barack Obama. He previously represented...
7th president of the United States
Andrew Jackson was a military hero and the seventh president of the United States (1829–37). He was the first U.S. president to come from the area west of the Appalachians and the first to gain office...
28th president of the United States
Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States (1913–21), an American scholar and statesman known for ambitious and lasting legislative achievements. Despite being a war-time president, Wilson...
35th president of the United States
John F. Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States (1961–63), who faced a number of foreign crises, especially in Cuba and Berlin, but managed to secure such achievements as the Nuclear Test-Ban...
Venezuelan soldier and statesman
Simón Bolívar was a Venezuelan soldier and statesman who led the revolutions against Spanish rule in the Viceroyalty of New Granada. He was president of Gran Colombia (1819–30) and dictator of Peru (1823–26)....
6th president of the United States
John Quincy Adams was the sixth president of the United States (1825–29) and eldest son of President John Adams. In his prepresidential years he was one of America’s greatest diplomats (formulating, among...
37th president of the United States
Richard Nixon was the 37th president of the United States (1969–74), who, faced with almost certain impeachment for his role in the Watergate scandal, became the first American president to resign from...
president of South Africa
Jacob Zuma is a politician who served as president of South Africa from 2009 until he resigned under pressure in 2018. He also served as the country’s deputy president (1999–2005) and as deputy president...
34th president of the United States
Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th president of the United States (1953–61), who had been supreme commander of the Allied forces in western Europe during World War II. Eisenhower was the third of seven...
2nd president of the United States
John Adams was an early advocate of American independence from Great Britain, a major figure in the Continental Congress (1774–77), the author of the Massachusetts constitution (1780), a signer of the...
36th president of the United States
Lyndon B. Johnson was the 36th president of the United States (1963–69). A moderate Democrat and vigorous leader in the United States Senate, Johnson was elected vice president in 1960 and acceded to the...
Second Supreme Leader of Iran
Standing at the heart of the Islamic Republic from the 1979 Iranian Revolution until his death in 2026, Ali Khamenei played a pivotal role in both the militarization of the Iranian state and the consolidation...
president of South Korea
Yoon Suk-Yeol is a South Korean lawyer and public official who served as prosecutor general (2019–21) and president (2022–25) of South Korea. On December 3, 2024, he declared martial law, ostensibly to...
president of France
Charles de Gaulle was a French soldier, writer, statesman, and architect of France’s Fifth Republic. De Gaulle was the second son of a Roman Catholic, patriotic, and nationalist upper-middle-class family....
political leader of Cuba
Fidel Castro was the political leader of Cuba (1959–2008) who transformed his country into the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere. Castro became a symbol of communist revolution in Latin America....
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...
emperor of France
Napoleon III was the nephew of Napoleon I, president of the Second Republic of France (1850–52), and then emperor of the French (1852–70). He gave his country two decades of prosperity under a stable,...
president of Brazil
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is a Brazilian politician who serves as president of Brazil (2003–11; 2023– ). In 2026 he defeated Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro to win an unprecedented fourth term in office. Born in...
26th president of the United States
Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th president of the United States (1901–09) and a writer, naturalist, and soldier. He expanded the powers of the presidency and of the federal government in support of the...
president of North Vietnam
Ho Chi Minh was the founder of the Indochina Communist Party (1930) and its successor, the Viet-Minh (1941), and president from 1945 to 1969 of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). As the...
18th president of the United States
Ulysses S. Grant was a U.S. general, commander of the Union armies during the late years (1864–65) of the American Civil War, and the 18th president of the United States (1869–77). Grant was the son of...
president of South Korea
Park Chung-Hee was a South Korean general and politician, president of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) from 1963 to his death. Widely regarded as the most influential South Korean leader of the 20th...
42nd president of the United States
Bill Clinton is the 42nd president of the United States (1993–2001), who oversaw the country’s longest peacetime economic expansion. In 1998 he became the second U.S. president to be impeached; he was...
president of France
Emmanuel Macron is a French banker and politician who was elected president of France in 2017. Macron was the first person in the history of the Fifth Republic to win the presidency without the backing...
president of Brazil
Dilma Rousseff is a Brazilian politician who in 2011 became Brazil’s first female president. She was reelected in 2014 but impeached and removed from office in 2016. Rousseff was raised in an upper-middle-class...
president of Zimbabwe
Robert Mugabe was the first prime minister (1980–87) of the reconstituted state of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia. A Black nationalist of Marxist persuasion, he eventually established one-party rule in his...
president of Venezuela
Hugo Chávez was a Venezuelan politician who was president of Venezuela (1999–2013). Chávez styled himself as the leader of the “Bolivarian Revolution,” a socialist political program for much of Latin America,...
president of Yemen
Ali Abdullah Saleh was a Yemeni military officer and president of Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) from 1978 until its 1990 unification with the south, after which he served as president of reunified...
president of interim government of Syria
Ahmed al-Sharaa is the president (2025– ) of Syria’s interim government, having commanded the Syrian Civil War rebel forces that toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024. He was previously notorious...
president of Egypt
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is an Egyptian military officer who became Egypt’s de facto leader in July 2013, after the country’s military removed Pres. Mohamed Morsi from power following mass protests against...
33rd president of the United States
Harry S. Truman was the 33rd president of the United States (1945–53), who led his country through the final stages of World War II and through the early years of the Cold War, vigorously opposing Soviet...
president of Madagascar
Andry Rajoelina is a Malagasy entrepreneur and politician who served as president of Madagascar from 2009 to 2014 after coming to power in a coup. He again served as president (2019–23; 2023–25) after...
president of Kenya
Uhuru Kenyatta is a Kenyan businessman and politician who held several government posts before serving as president of Kenya from 2013 to 2022. The son of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, Uhuru...
39th president of the United States
Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States (1977–81), who served as the country’s chief executive during a time of serious problems at home and abroad. His perceived inability to deal successfully...
5th president of the United States
James Monroe was the fifth president of the United States (1817–25), who issued an important contribution to U.S. foreign policy in the Monroe Doctrine, a warning to European nations against intervening...
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