Year 1688 (MDCLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar and a leap year starting on Sunday of the 10-day slower Julian calendar.

Steven Pincus is a professor of history at Yale University where he specializes in 17th and 18th century British and European history. He is also the Chair of Yale's Council on European Studies.

In 1990, Pincus received a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University. He is a prominent scholar of Early Modern British history, and his work has focused on the 17th century, in particular the Glorious Revolution and English foreign policy. His book 1688: The First Modern Revolution has been praised as providing "a new understanding of the origins of the modern, liberal state."The Economist named it as one of the best books on history published in 2009. In March 2010 he delivered the Sir John Neale lecture at University College, London. He is in Oxford for the 2010-2011 academic year working on the origins of the British Empire.

Johann Philipp Krieger (also Kriger, Krüger, Krugl, and Giovanni Filippo Kriegher; 25 February 1649 – 7 February 1725) was a German Baroque composer and organist. He was the elder brother of Johann Krieger.

The Krieger brothers came from a Nuremberg family of rugmakers. According to Johann Mattheson's Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte, Johann Philipp started studying keyboard playing at age 8, with Johann Drechsel (a pupil of the celebrated Johann Jakob Froberger) and other instruments at around the same time, with Gabriel Schütz. He was apparently a gifted student, displaying absolute pitch and a feeling for keyboard music: according to Mattheson, already after a year of studies he was able to impress large audiences and was composing attractive arias. Johann Philipp soon left Nuremberg for Copenhagen, where he spent some four or five years, studying organ playing with Johann Schröder, the royal organist, and composition with Kaspar Förster. The precise dates of his stay in Copenhagen are unknown: Mattheson reports 1665 to 1670, but Johan Gabriel Doppelmayr, author of a 1730 biographical volume on famous residents of Nuremberg, claimed Johann Philipp stayed in Copenhagen between 1663 and 1667. During his stay, whenever it occurred, Johann Philipp was offered an invitation to become organist in Christiania (now Oslo, Norway), which he declined.

Johann Friedrich Fasch (15 April 1688 – 5 December 1758) was a German violinist and composer.

Fasch was born in Buttelstedt, was a choirboy in Weissenfels and studied under Johann Kuhnau at the famous St. Thomas School in Leipzig and later founded a Collegium Musicum in that city. He then traveled throughout Germany, becoming a violinist in the orchestra in Bayreuth in 1714 and holding court posts in Greiz and Lukavec. In 1722 he was appointed Kapellmeister at Zerbst, a post he held until his death.

His works include cantatas, concertos, symphonies, and chamber music. None of his pieces were printed in his lifetime, and a large number of his vocal works, including four operas, have been lost. However, he was held in high regard by his contemporaries (Johann Sebastian Bach made manuscript copies of a number of his pieces), and he is today considered an important link between the Baroque and Classical periods.

Fasch died in Zerbst at the age of 70. He was the father of Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch, also a musician of note.

John Bunyan (28 November 1628 – 31 August 1688) was an English Christian writer and preacher, who is well-known for his book The Pilgrim's Progress. Though he was a Reformed Baptist, he is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on August 30th, and on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (US) on August 29th.

John Bunyan was born in 1628 to Thomas and Margaret Bunyan in Bunyan's End in the parish of Elstow, Bedfordshire, England. Bunyan's End was located approximately half way between the hamlet of Harrowden (one mile southeast of Bedford) and Elstow's High Street. He is recorded in the Elstow parish register as having been baptised John Bunyan, on 30 November 1628.

On 23 May 1627, Thomas married his first wife, Margaret Bentley. Like Thomas, she was from Elstow and she was also born in 1603. In 1628, Margaret's sister, Rose Bentley, married Thomas' half-brother Edward Bunyan. They were ordinary villagers, with Thomas earning a living as a chapman but he may also have been a brazier - one who made and/or mended kettles and pots. Bunyan wrote of his modest origins, "My descent was of a low and inconsiderable generation, my father's house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families of the land".