Gloria Jean Watkins (born on September 25, 1952), better known as bell hooks is an African-American intellectual, feminist, and social activist. Hooks focuses on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. She has published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures.

David Harvey (born 1935) is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he graduated from Cambridge with a PhD in Geography. He is the world's most cited academic geographer (according to Andrew Bodman, see "Transactions of the IBG", 1991,1992), …

Paul Fussell (born March 22, 1924, Pasadena, California, USA) is a cultural and literary historian, and professor emeritus of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of books on eighteenth-century English literature, the world wars, and social class, among others. Fussell was drafted into the Army in 1943, at age 19. In October 1944 he landed in France, as part of the 103rd Infantry Division.

Mike Davis (born 1946) is an American social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and political activist. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California. Born in Fontana, California and raised in El Cajon, California, Davis' education was punctuated by stints as a meat cutter, truck driver, and a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist.

Stan Goff (born 1951) is a writer, activist, and blogger in the United States on topics including peak oil, militarism, imperialism, race, gender, and class. He is a retired Special Forces master sergeant, and was in the U.S. military from 1970 until 1996, and received the Combat Infantryman Badge. He is an anti-war activist, feminist, and socialist (once describing himself as "red as a baboon's ass and proud of it."). He is the author of "Hideous Dream", …

Eudora Welty (b. April 13 1909, Jackson, Mississippi - d. July 23 2001, Jackson, Mississippi) was an award-winning author and photographer who wrote about the American South. Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi and lived a significant portion of her life in the city's Belhaven neighborhood, where her home has been preserved. She was educated at the Mississippi State College for Women (now called Mississippi University for Women), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, …

Erik Olin Wright (b. 1947, Berkeley, California), is an American until recently Analytical Marxist sociologist, specializing in social stratification, and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. His work is concerned mainly with the study of social classes, and in particular with the task of providing an update to and elaboration of the Marxist concept of class, …

William Smith (March 23 1769 - August 28 1839) was an English geologist, credited with creating the first nationwide geologic map. He is known as the "Father of English Geology", however recognition was slow in coming. His work was plagiarised, he was financially ruined, and he spent time in debtors' prison. The genteel practitioners of the new science of geology and founders of the geological societies snubbed the low-born Smith.

John Arthur Porter (November 12, 1921 - June 15, 1979) was one of Canada's most important sociologists during the period from 1950 to the late 1970's. His work in the field of social stratification opened up new areas of inquiry for many sociologists in Canada. Porter was born in Vancouver and completed his education at the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom. While at the LSE, he became interested in studies of social class.

Nicos Poulantzas (1936-1979) was a Greco-French Marxist political sociologist. In the 1970s, Poulantzas was known, along with Louis Althusser, as a leading Structural Marxist and while at first a Leninist, he eventually became a proponent of eurocommunism. He is most well-known for his theoretical work on the state. But he also offered Marxist contributions to the analysis of fascism, social class in the contemporary world, …

David R. Roediger (July 13, 1952) is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research interests include the construction of racial identity, class structures, and the history of American radicalism. He writes from an admittedly Marxist theoretical framework.

Myra Marx Ferree is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for German and European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also a member of the Women’s Studies Program. In 2005 she was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and in 2004 the Maria-Jahoda Visiting Professor at the Ruhr University Bochum. She has written numerous articles about feminist organizations and politics in the US, Germany and internationally, …

James Robert Flynn (also Jim Flynn, born 1934) is an intelligence researcher and Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, known for his discovery of the Flynn effect, the continued year-on-year rise of IQ scores in all parts of the world. Flynn is the author of five books and his research interests are humane ideals and ideological debate, classics of political philosophy, and race, …

Georges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society. He is considered one of the major contributors to mythography, in particular for his creation of the trifunctional hypothesis of social class.

Nathan McCall (born 1955) is an African-American author who grew up in the Cavalier Manor section of Portsmouth, Virginia. As the son of a Navy man, McCall also grew up in various locations, such as Morocco and Norfolk, Virginia. After serving three years in prison, he studied journalism at Norfolk State University. He reported for the Virginian Pilot-Ledger and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution before moving to The Washington Post In 1989.

Georges Vacher de Lapouge was a French anthropologist and a theoretician of eugenics and scientific racism. He was also a member of the SFIO socialist party. He wrote "L'Aryen et son rôle social" (1899, "The Aryan and his Social Role"), which gave its bases to Nazi anti-semitism. He opposed the white, "Aryan race", "dolichocephalic", to the "brachycephalic" race, whom the "Jew" is the archetype.

Joseph A. Tainter is a U.S. anthropologist and historian. He studied anthropology at the University of California and Northwestern University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1975. He is Project Leader of Cultural Heritage Research, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has taught anthropology at the University of New Mexico, and is the author or editor of many articles and monographs.

Morton J. Horwitz (born 1938) is a legal historian and law professor at Harvard Law School. The current dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, relates that during her time at law school, students often nicknamed him as "Mort the Tort" since he taught the first-year subject Torts. Horwitz obtained a A.B. from the City College of New York (1959), an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1962 and 1964), and an LL.B. from Harvard Law School (1967).

Alcaeus (Alkaios) of Mytilene (c. 620 BCE-6th century BCE), Greek lyric poet who supposedly invented the Alcaic verse; he was an older contemporary and an alleged lover of Sappho, with whom he may have exchanged poems. He was born into the aristocratic governing class of Mytilene, the main city of Lesbos, where his life was entangled with its political disputes and internal feuds. The date of his death is unknown.

William D. Rubinstein is a noted historian. His latest work, "Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution", charts the rise of the so-called 'super rich', a class he sees as expanding exponentially. In it, he makes the astounding point that millionaires have become Britain’s fastest-growing social class; every single working day, another hundred people, many of them women, become millionaires.

Charles Mills is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1985, and taught at the University of Oklahoma previously. His main research interests are in political theory (radical and oppositional), particularly around issues of social class, gender, and race. He has published numerous articles on Marxism, Critical Race Theory, and African-American philosophy.

Jan Piotr Norblin de la Gourdaine (French: Jean Pierre) (15 July 1740 - 23 February 1830) was a French-born painter, draughtsman, engraver, drawing artist and caricaturist. From 1774 until 1804 he resided in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where he gained a citizenship. He is considered to be one of the most important painters of the Polish Enlightenment. His success in Poland was enormous, with great commissions from the finest families, …

William Pope. L [born 1955] is a prominent, multi-disciplinary artist known for his ironic and martial conceptual art dealing with consumerism, social class and racism. Pope. L regularly draws upon his African-American heritage to tackle variations upon what he calls "social conundrum." Pope. L tackles "social conundrums" with a humorous and visceral angle. The "social conundrums" that he aims to highlight in his work includes issues revolving round race, homelessness, …

Krzysztof Zbaraski was a Polish member of the gentry social class ("szlachta"). During his life, he was a Master of the Stables of the Crown (or "koniuszy koronny"), member of special committee for Cossacks and tariffs, skilled diplomat, and politician of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Starost of Krzemieniów, Wiślica, Hrubieszów and Bolesławiec. Zbaraski served as Commonwealth ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1622 to 1624.

Terre Thaemlitz is an award-winning multi-media producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label. His work critically combines themes of identity politics - including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race - with an ongoing critique of the socio-economics of commercial media production. This diversity of themes is matched by Thaemlitz' wide range of production styles, …

Georgiana Molloy was an early settler in Western Australia, who is remembered as one of the first botanical collectors in the colony. Georgiana Molloy was born Georgiana Kennedy in Cumberland on 23 May 1805. In her youth she was caught up in the Christian revival sparked by the preacher Edward Irving. She became deeply religious, and gradually became estranged from her family, who did not share her fervour.

Esmond Marcus David Romilly, was a well-born British socialist and anti-fascist. His mother was the natural daughter of Lady Blanche Hozier(1852–1925), daughter of the 10th Earl of Airlie and second wife of Sir Henry Montague Hozier (1838–1907); her father may well have been Wilfred Scawen Blunt. He was therefore the (half-) nephew to Winston Churchill's wife, another Lady Blanche's natural daughter.

Colonel Martin J. "Matt" Winn (1861 - October 6, 1949) was a prominent personality in American thoroughbred horse racing history and president of Churchill Downs racetrack, home to the Kentucky Derby race that he made famous. A Louisville, Kentucky, businessman, Matt Winn had been a racing enthusiast since the day his father brought him to see the first running of the Kentucky Derby in 1875.

Margaret Clap (better known as Mother Clap, died circa 1726) was a woman who ran a brothel for homosexual men in London in the early part of the 18th century. At the time homosexuality in England was illegal, punishable by execution. Despite this, particularly in larger cities, private homosexual activity did take place. To service these actions, mainly in the cities, there existed brothels where men (from all social classes) could find homosexual partners.

Yamaga Sokō was a Japanese philosopher and strategist during the Tokugawa shogunate. He was a Confucian, and applied Confucius's idea of the "superior man" to the samurai class of Japan. This became an important part of the samurai way of life and code of conduct later known as "bushido". By adapting the Confucian tradition to their own requirements, Japanese scholars implied a repudiation of Tokugawa authority over intellectual matters.

Constantia Jones, a prostitute in London, United Kingdom during the term of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, was sentenced to hang for stealing 36 shillings and a half-guinea (the equivalent of about £300 today) from one of her clients. Her accuser, describing her as "a three-penny upright," testified as follows: "As I stood against the Wall, [she] came behind me, and with one hand she took hold of.