The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in History,
#51
Daniel Woolf
#5774
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#52
Ian Kershaw
#1183
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sir Ian Kershaw is an English historian whose work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th-century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world's experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is particularly noted for his biographies of Hitler.
Go to Profile#53
Deborah Lipstadt
#1661
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Deborah Esther Lipstadt is an American historian and diplomat, best known as author of the books Denying the Holocaust , History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier , The Eichmann Trial , and Antisemitism: Here and Now . She has served as the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism since May 3, 2022. Since 1993 she has been the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US.
Go to Profile#54
Alan Bullock
#1483
Overall Influence
1914 - 2004 (90 years)
Alan Louis Charles Bullock, Baron Bullock, was a British historian. He is best known for his book Hitler: A Study in Tyranny , the first comprehensive biography of Adolf Hitler, which influenced many other Hitler biographies.
Go to Profile#55
John Lewis Gaddis
#2167
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
John Lewis Gaddis is an American military historian, political scientist, and writer. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He is best known for his work on the Cold War and grand strategy, and he has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times. Gaddis is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th-century American statesman George F. Kennan. George F. Kennan: An American Life , his biography of Kennan, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Go to Profile#56
Ronald Hutton
#1025
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ronald Edmund Hutton is an English historian who specialises in early modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and Contemporary Paganism. He is a professor at the University of Bristol, has written 14 books and has appeared on British television and radio. He held a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is a Commissioner of English Heritage.
Go to Profile#57
Richard Overy
#2133
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Richard James Overy is a British historian who has published on the history of World War II and Nazi Germany. In 2007, as The Times editor of Complete History of the World, he chose the 50 key dates of world history.
Go to Profile#58
J. R. McNeill
#8358
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John Robert McNeill is an American environmental historian, author, and professor at Georgetown University. He is best known for "pioneering the study of environmental history". In 2000 he published Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, which argues that human activity during the 20th century led to environmental changes on an unprecedented scale, primarily due to the energy system built around fossil fuels.
Go to Profile#59
David Hackett Fischer
#2486
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
David Hackett Fischer is University Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University. Fischer's major works have covered topics ranging from large macroeconomic and cultural trends to narrative histories of significant events to explorations of historiography .
Go to Profile#60
Michael Shermer
#256
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Michael Brant Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, executive director of The Skeptics Society, and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a publication focused on investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The author of over a dozen books, Shermer is known for engaging in debates on pseudoscience and religion in which he emphasizes scientific skepticism.
Go to Profile#61
Peter Stearns
#7025
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Peter Nathaniel Stearns is a professor at George Mason University, where he was provost from January 1, 2000 to July 2014. Stearns was chair of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University and also served as the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. In addition, he founded and edited the Journal of Social History. While at Carnegie Mellon, he developed a pioneering approach to teaching World History, and has contributed to the field as well through editing, and contributing to, the Routledge series, Themes in World History. He is als...
Go to Profile#62
Donald Worster
#6875
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Donald Worster is an American environmental historian who was, until his retirement, the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. He is one of the founders of, and leading figures in, the field of environmental history. In 2009, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After retirement from University of Kansas, he became Distinguished Foreign Expert and senior professor in the School of History of Renmin University of China.
Go to Profile#63
J. G. A. Pocock
#3170
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
John Greville Agard Pocock is a New Zealand historian of political thought. He is especially known for his studies of republicanism in the early modern period , his work on the history of English common law, his treatment of Edward Gibbon and other Enlightenment historians, and, in historical method, for his contributions to the history of political discourse.
Go to Profile#64
Diarmaid MacCulloch
#3886
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#65
Ranajit Guha
#3732
Overall Influence
1923 - 2023 (100 years)
Ranajit Guha was an Indian historian, who was one of the early pioneers of the Subaltern Studies group, a methodology of South Asian Studies focused on post-colonial and post-imperial societies, studying them from the perspective of the underclasses. He was the editor of several of the group's early anthologies and wrote extensively both in English and in Bengali.
Go to Profile#66
John Hope Franklin
#3552
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
John Hope Franklin was an American historian of the United States and former president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Go to Profile#67
Walter Scheidel
#2804
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Walter Scheidel is an Austrian historian who teaches ancient history at Stanford University, California. Scheidel's main research interests are ancient social and economic history, pre-modern historical demography, and comparative and transdisciplinary approaches to world history.
Go to Profile#68
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#1070
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a specialist in American history, much of Schlesinger's work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson II. Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian" to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963.
Go to Profile#69
Yuval Noah Harari
#1438
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
#70
Bipan Chandra
#4715
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Bipan Chandra was an Indian historian, specialising in economic and political history of modern India. An emeritus professor of modern history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, he specialized on the Indian independence movement and is considered a leading scholar on Mahatma Gandhi. He authored several books, including The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism.
Go to Profile#71
Patricia Crone
#2898
Overall Influence
1945 - 2015 (70 years)
Patricia Crone was a Danish historian specialised in early Islamic history. Crone was a member of the Revisionist school of Islamic studies and questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam.
Go to Profile#72
John Keegan
#2491
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan was an English military historian, lecturer, author and journalist. He wrote many published works on the nature of combat between prehistory and the 21st century, covering land, air, maritime, intelligence warfare and the psychology of battle.
Go to Profile#73
Roger Chartier
#5133
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Roger Chartier, , is a French historian and historiographer who is part of the Annales school. He works on the history of books, publishing and reading. He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collège de France, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#74
Norman Cantor
#5337
Overall Influence
1929 - 2004 (75 years)
Norman Frank Cantor was a Canadian-American medievalist. Known for his accessible writing and engaging narrative style, Cantor's books were among the most widely read treatments of medieval history in English. He estimated that his textbook The Civilization of the Middle Ages, first published in 1963, had a million copies in circulation.
Go to Profile#75
Sean Wilentz
#2367
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Robert Sean Wilentz is an American historian who serves as the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979. His primary research interests include U.S. social and political history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written numerous award-winning books and articles including, most notably, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Go to Profile#76
Tony Judt
#2556
Overall Influence
1948 - 2010 (62 years)
Tony Robert Judt was an English historian, essayist and university professor who specialized in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University and director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. In 1996 Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Go to Profile#77
Henry Steele Commager
#4361
Overall Influence
1902 - 1998 (96 years)
Henry Steele Commager was an American historian. As one of the most active and prolific liberal intellectuals of his time, with 40 books and 700 essays and reviews, he helped define modern liberalism in the United States.
Go to Profile#78
Jill Lepore
#4653
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Jill Lepore is an American historian and journalist. She is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics.
Go to Profile#79
Paul Kennedy
#2918
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Paul Michael Kennedy is a British historian specialising in the history of international relations, economic power and grand strategy. He has published on the history of British foreign policy and great power struggles, emphasizing the changing economic power base that undergirds military and naval strength, noting how declining economic power leads to reduced military and diplomatic weight.
Go to Profile#80
Averil Cameron
#7925
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Dame Averil Millicent Cameron , often cited as A. M. Cameron, is a British historian. She writes on Late Antiquity, Classics, and Byzantine Studies. She was Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at the University of Oxford, and the Warden of Keble College, Oxford, between 1994 and 2010.
Go to Profile#81
Gertrude Himmelfarb
#3585
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
#82
Victor Davis Hanson
#1918
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, farmer, and political commentator. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Washington Times, and other media outlets.
Go to Profile#83
Ahasuerus
#1943
Overall Influence
Ahasuerus is a name applied in the Hebrew Bible to three rulers of Ancient Persia and to a Babylonian official in the Book of Tobit. It is a transliteration of either Xerxes I or Artaxerxes; both are names of multiple Achaemenid dynasty Persian kings.
Go to Profile#84
Eugen Weber
#3358
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Eugen Joseph Weber was a Romanian-born American historian with a special focus on Western civilization. Weber became a historian because of his interest in politics, an interest dating back to at least the age of 12. He described his political awakening as a realization of social injustices: "It was my vague dissatisfaction with social hierarchy, the subjection of servants and peasants, the diffuse violence of everyday life in relatively peaceful country amongst apparently gentle folk".
Go to Profile#85
Gerda Lerner
#3774
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Gerda Hedwig Lerner was an Austrian-born American historian and woman's history author. In addition to her numerous scholarly publications, she wrote poetry, fiction, theatre pieces, screenplays, and an autobiography. She served as president of the Organization of American Historians from 1980 to 1981. In 1980, she was appointed Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught until retiring in 1991.
Go to Profile#86
Antony Beevor
#1923
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
#87
Roderick Nash
#5609
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Roderick Frazier Nash is a professor emeritus of history and environmental studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. He was the first person to descend the Tuolumne River using a raft. Scholarly biography Nash received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 1960 and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1965. He is the author of several books and essays. His dissertation, "Wilderness and the American Mind," done under the supervision of Merle Curti, became what has come to be seen as one of the foundational texts of the field of environmental history. Af...
Go to Profile#88
Jürgen Osterhammel
#7336
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jürgen Osterhammel is a German historian specialized in Chinese and world history. He is professor emeritus at the University of Konstanz. Academia Osterhammel started his academic career as a research fee student at the London School of Economics in 1976/77 and studied and worked there under Professor Ian Nish. In 1980, he obtained his PhD from the University of Kassel in modern history.
Go to Profile#89
Robert Darnton
#1969
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert Choate Darnton is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specializes in 18th-century France. He was director of the Harvard University Library from 2007 to 2016. Life Darnton was born in New York City. He graduated from Phillips Academy in 1957 and Harvard University in 1960, attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, and earned a PhD in history from Oxford in 1964, where he studied with Richard Cobb, among others. The title of his thesis was Trends in radical propaganda on the eve of the French Revolution . He worked as reporter at The New York Times from 1964 to 1965.
Go to Profile#90
James J. Sheehan
#9125
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
James J. Sheehan is an American historian of modern Germany and the former president of the American Historical Association . Biography Born in San Francisco in 1937, Sheehan earned a B.A. from Stanford University in 1958 and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. He taught at Northwestern University between 1964 and 1979, then moved back to Stanford to succeed Gordon A. Craig as Stanford's historian of modern Germany. At Stanford, Sheehan is Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of History, and FSI senior fellow .
Go to Profile#91
Karl Dietrich Bracher
#2989
Overall Influence
1922 - 2016 (94 years)
Karl Dietrich Bracher was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959. In 1951, Bracher married Dorothee Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They had two chil...
Go to Profile#92
Fritz Fischer
#4432
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
Fritz Fischer was a German historian best known for his analysis of the causes of World War I. In the early 1960s Fischer advanced the controversial thesis at the time that responsibility for the outbreak of the war rested solely on Imperial Germany. Fischer's anti-revisionist claims shocked the West German government and historical establishment, as it made Germany guilty for both world wars, challenging the national belief in Germany's innocence and converting its recent history into one of conquest and aggression.
Go to Profile#93
Norman Stone
#3301
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Norman Stone was a British historian and author. At the time of his death, he was Professor of European History in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University, having formerly been a professor at the University of Oxford, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and an adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He was a board member of the Center for Eurasian Studies , and devoted some of the last years of his life to promoting Armenian genocide denial.
Go to Profile#94
Marc Ferro
#5945
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Marc Ferro was a French historian. Life and career Ferro worked on early twentieth-century European history, specialising in the history of Russia and the USSR, as well as the history of cinema. His Ukrainian-Jewish mother was murdered during the Holocaust.
Go to Profile#95
Andrey Korotayev
#1439
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
#96
Keith Jenkins
#6209
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Keith Jenkins is a British historiographer. Jenkins studied medieval and modern history as well as political theory at The University of Nottingham. Like Hayden White and "postmodern" historiographers, Jenkins believes that any historian's output should be seen as a story. A work of history is as much about the historian's own world view and ideological positions as it is about past events. This means that different historians will inevitably ascribe different meanings to the same historical events. Nevertheless, all historians are constrained by the common body of historical evidence .
Go to Profile#97
Gerhard Weinberg
#3016
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Gerhard Ludwig Weinberg is a German-born American diplomatic and military historian noted for his studies in the history of Nazi Germany and World War II. Weinberg is the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been a member of the history faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1974. Previously he served on the faculties of the University of Michigan and the University of Kentucky .
Go to Profile#98
Larry Schweikart
#5593
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Larry Earl Schweikart is an American historian and retired professor of history at the University of Dayton. During the 1980s and 1990s, he authored numerous scholarly publications. In recent years, he has authored popular books, including A Patriot's History of the United States and 48 Liberal Lies About American History. According to professors Guy Burton and Ted Goertzel, "Schweikart and Allen are both history professors with distinguished publication records."
Go to Profile#99
Hans Mommsen
#4075
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Hans Mommsen was a German historian, known for his studies in German social history, for his functionalist interpretation of the Third Reich, and especially for arguing that Adolf Hitler was a weak dictator. Descended from Nobel Prizewinning historian Theodor Mommsen, he was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
Go to Profile#100
Anne Applebaum
#1636
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is an American and naturalized-Polish journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
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