Ignatius L. Donnelly

Ignatius Loyola Donnelly ( born November 3, 1831 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, † January 1, 1901 in Minneapolis, Minnesota) was an American lawyer and congressman. Mainly he was known by his theories about Atlantis.

Life

In his 1882 published book Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (German: " Atlantis, the Antediluvian World ", 1911) he suspected a defunct in the North Atlantic continent as a place described by the Greek philosopher Plato, Atlantis. Donnelly believed that he fell in prehistoric times and now only the mountain tops sticking out of the water - the Azores. Some residents of Atlantis would have survived the disaster and fled in different groups to Europe and Central America. There they would have brought the " primitive natives " the art of writing, metallurgy and construction of the pyramid.

Donnelly's work whose content is now turned out to be scientifically untenable, in all material aspects, the interest in Atlantis in Europe and especially in the United States revived again. Since the publication of his book, tens of thousands of other works on Atlantis were published, and some authors refer to this day Donnelly.

He was on 4 March 1863 to 3 March 1869 as Republican deputy of the second congressional district of Minnesota in the House of Representatives of the United States. Previously, he had from 1859 to 1863 held the post of Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota. From 1874 to 1878 Donnelly became politically active as a senator in the Minnesota Senate again. In the years 1887 and 1888 he was a member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota as an independent candidate, in the years 1891 to 1894 and from 1897 to 1898 he sat again in the Senate of the State.