Lifespans of Famous Quakers
11 mo. 25, 2011
This doesn’t have much to do directly with Quaker language, but I made the following chart showing the lifespans of various well-known Friends, and thought readers of this blog might be interested. To see the graph full-sized, click on it. This should open the image file; then you may need to click on it again to enlarge.
Individuals are arranged chronologically by birth year. I think it is interesting how the slope changes at various points in history. You can also see very graphically how many Quakers did not make it through the 1660s.
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I am a professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois, and a member of Urbana-Champaign Friends Meeting.
12 mo. 07, 2011 at 7:44 pm
I love these kinds of charts. thank you.
But if you’ve got Richard Nixon on the list, why not Thomas Paine? Also, the great anthropologist of religion Edward Burnett Tyler comes to mind.
I can see how your chart might be based on a custom spreadsheet file like Excell – or is it something else?
12 mo. 07, 2011 at 8:15 pm
The chart was generated in Excel, yes. I decided who to include mainly based on listings in “The A to Z of the Friends” by Abbott, et al., and/or Wikipedia’s “List of Quakers” — though I left out some people from both lists, especially if I didn’t recognize their names, or didn’t think their association with Quakers was a prominent part of their public identities.Some important early Friends were also left out because their birth years are unknown. I recognize it’s pretty arbitrary who got included and who didn’t, but coming up with rigorous, objective criteria for inclusion would have required more time and effort than I was willing to invest.