Meet Harriet Tubman: Nineteen Trips Back
She escaped slavery alone in 1849, and then went back — again and again — into the country that would have killed her for it.
Meet a Mentorchangemakers2 min
MentorMindsAll entries
115 entries
Meet Doreen Valiente: The Witch Who Edited Her Own Religion
Initiated into Gerald Gardner’s coven in 1953, she noticed how much of its “ancient” liturgy was borrowed — and rewrote it into the words modern witchcraft still uses.
Meet a Mentorspirituality2 min
Meet Ada Lovelace: The Notes Were the Invention
She was asked to translate an article about a machine that did not exist. Her footnotes were three times longer than the article, and one of them is the first computer program.
Meet a Mentorscience2 min
The Long Apprenticeship of Florence Nightingale
Before Scutari there were seventeen years of refusal, study and quiet preparation. Nightingale's life is a lesson in earning the right to act, and then acting on the evidence.
Detailed Historydiscipline8 min
Meet Albert Einstein: The Clerk Who Rewrote Physics
In one year, from a desk at the Swiss patent office, he published four papers that broke open space, time and matter — and the Nobel was not for the famous one.
Meet a Mentorscience2 min
Meet Confucius: The Adviser Nobody Would Hire
He spent years travelling between states looking for a ruler who would let him try his ideas, largely failed, and taught the students who reshaped Chinese civilisation.
Meet a Mentorphilosophy2 min
Meet Nagarjuna: The Philosopher Who Refused to Have a Position
He argued that nothing whatever exists on its own — and that this is the most hopeful thing anyone has ever said. Eighteen centuries later, nobody has landed a clean hit on the argument.
Meet a Mentorphilosophy3 min
Meet Frederick Douglass: Literacy as the Road to Freedom
He was taught the alphabet until it was forbidden as dangerous — and then spent his life proving that the man who forbade it was right.
Meet a Mentorchangemakers2 min
Meet Leonardo da Vinci: The Notebooks of a Man Who Could Not Stop Looking
He finished remarkably little and left about seven thousand pages of notes — written backwards — on everything from bird flight to the muscles of the human face.
Meet a Mentorcreativity2 min
Meet Socrates: The Man Who Wrote Nothing
He left no books, founded no school, and charged no fees — then changed philosophy permanently by asking people what they meant.
Meet a Mentorphilosophy2 min