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).
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List of the most influential people in History,
#501
Frank Kolb
#44066
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Frank Kolb is a German professor of ancient history at the University of Tübingen in Germany. He has been involved in a controversy over findings concerning the late Bronze Age in Troy, and accused Dr. Manfred Korfmann, a professor who has been leading excavations at the archaeological site of Troy, of deliberately misrepresenting his findings there. Kolb believes Troy was not an important city, but Korfmann had suggested that it was a significant trade centre.
Go to Profile#502
Michael Lapidge
#12278
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michael Lapidge, FBA is a scholar in the field of Medieval Latin literature, particularly that composed in Anglo-Saxon England during the period 600–1100 AD; he is an emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and winner of the 2009 Sir Israel Gollancz Prize.
Go to Profile#503
Gershon Galil
#22591
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Gershon Galil is Professor of Biblical Studies and Ancient History and former chair of the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa, Israel. Gershon Galil earned his doctorate from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His work, The Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah, suggests a new chronology for the kings of ancient Israel and ancient Judah. His thesis was published by Brill Academic Publishers in 1996 and his chronology contrasts with those presented by the more traditional William F. Albright or Edwin R. Thiele.
Go to Profile#504
Walter Pohl
#22304
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Walter Pohl is an Austrian historian who is Professor of Auxiliary Sciences of History and Medieval History at the University of Vienna. He is a leading member of the Vienna School of History. Biography Walter Pohl was born in Vienna, Austria, on 27 December 1953. He received his PhD at the University of Vienna in 1984 under the supervision of Herwig Wolfram with a thesis on the Pannonian Avars. He received his habilitation in medieval history at the University of Vienna in 1989.
Go to Profile#505
Yoav Gelber
#13345
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Yoav Gelber is a professor of history at the University of Haifa, and was formerly a visiting professor at The University of Texas at Austin. He was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1943 and studied world and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is an expert on the history of the Israel Defense Forces. Gelber is also known to have been a vocal opponent of Ilan Pappé when the latter was employed by the University of Haifa, and a defender of the Alexandroni Brigade in the Tantura massacre case.
Go to Profile#506
John Boswell
#7416
Overall Influence
1947 - 1994 (47 years)
John Eastburn Boswell was an American historian and a full professor at Yale University. Many of Boswell's studies focused on the issue of religion and homosexuality, specifically Christianity and homosexuality. All of his work focused on the history of those at the margins of society.
Go to Profile#507
Peter Laslett
#4783
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Thomas Peter Ruffell Laslett was an English historian. Biography Laslett was the son of a Baptist minister and was born in Bedford on 18 December 1915. Although he spent much of his childhood in Oxford, he was educated at the Watford Grammar School for Boys. He began a degree course in history at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1935 and graduated with a double first in 1938. He stayed in Cambridge for some time, conducting historical research, then in 1940 joined the Fleet Air Arm. After a period working on protection of Arctic convoys, Laslett then learned Japanese at the School of Orienta...
Go to Profile#508
Michelle Perrot
#12419
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Michelle Perrot is a French historian, and Professor emeritus of Contemporary History at the Paris Diderot University. She won the 2009 Prix Femina Essai. Life She has worked on the history of labor movements, and studied with Ernest Labrousse, with Michel Foucault, and with Robert Badinter.
Go to Profile#509
W. Montgomery Watt
#6434
Overall Influence
1909 - 2006 (97 years)
William Montgomery Watt was a Scottish Orientalist, historian, academic, and Anglican priest. From 1964 to 1979, he was Professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Edinburgh. Watt was one of the foremost non-Muslim interpreters of Islam in the West, and according to Carole Hillenbrand "an enormously influential scholar in the field of Islamic studies and a much-revered name for many Muslims all over the world". Watt's comprehensive biography of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, Muhammad at Mecca and Muhammad at Medina , are considered to be classics in the field.
Go to Profile#510
Eberhard Kolb
#22351
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Professor Eberhard Kolb is a German historian, best known for his research of the German history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Biography Eberhard Kolb studied at the universities of Tübingen and Bonn, and attained a doctorate 1960 at the University of Göttingen on the topic of the influence of workers' councils on German domestic politics.
Go to Profile#511
Lewis Hanke
#30399
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Lewis Hanke was an American historian of colonial Latin America, and is best known for his writings on the Spanish conquest of Latin America. Hanke, along with two others, Irving A. Leonard and John T. Lanning, presented a revisionist narrative of colonial history that focused on the role of Bartolomé de las Casas, who famously advocated for the rights of Native Americans, and searched for just resolutions to the tensions between the conquistadores and the natives during the colonial period of Spanish rule. Hanke's writings documented Las Casas' work as a political activist, historian, political theorist, and anthropologist.
Go to Profile#512
Michael Beschloss
#10808
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Michael Richard Beschloss is an American historian specializing in the United States presidency. He is the author of nine books on the presidency. Early life Beschloss was born in Chicago, grew up in Flossmoor, Illinois, and was educated at Eaglebrook School, Phillips Academy , Williams College and Harvard University. He majored in political science, studying under James MacGregor Burns at Williams, from which he graduated with Highest Honors, and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School, with the original intention of writing history while serving as a foundation executive.
Go to Profile#513
Georg Iggers
#28383
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Georg Gerson Iggers was an American historian of modern Europe, historiography, and European intellectual history. Iggers was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1926. Being a German Jew he fled Germany with his family to the US in 1938, only few weeks before the Kristallnacht. Iggers belonged to the young émigrés from the Third Reich who later in life, as academic scholars in the United States, had a decisive impact on reviewing critically the history of Germany.
Go to Profile#514
Paul Fussell
#3383
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Paul Fussell Jr. was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America's class system. Fussell served in the 103rd Infantry Division during World War II and was wounded in fighting in France. Returning to the US, Fussell wrote extensively and held several faculty positions, most prominently at Rutgers University and at the University of Pennsylvania . He is best known for his writings about World War I and II, which explore what he felt wa...
Go to Profile#515
Sarvepalli Gopal
#11697
Overall Influence
1923 - 2002 (79 years)
Sarvepalli Gopal was a well-known Indian historian. He was the son of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the first Vice-President and the second President of India. He was the author of the Radhakrishnan: A Biography and Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography.
Go to Profile#516
David E. Kaiser
#21725
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David E. Kaiser is an American historian whose published works have covered a broad range of topics, from European warfare to American League baseball. He was a Professor in the Strategy and Policy Department of the United States Naval War College from 1990 until 2012 and has taught at Carnegie Mellon, Williams College, and Harvard University.
Go to Profile#517
Marcel Gauchet
#4302
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Marcel Gauchet is a French historian, philosopher, and sociologist. He is professor emeritus of the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and head of the periodical Le Débat. Gauchet is one of France's most prominent contemporary intellectuals. He has written widely on such issues as the political consequences of modern individualism, the relation between religion and democracy, and the dilemmas of globalisation.
Go to Profile#518
Michael Ledeen
#2938
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Michael Arthur Ledeen is an American historian and neoconservative foreign policy analyst. He is a former consultant to the United States National Security Council, the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense. He held the Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a scholar for twenty years and now holds the similarly named chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was very close to Antonio Martino.
Go to Profile#519
Hirofumi Hayashi
#23561
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Hirofumi Hayashi is a historian, an authority on modern Japanese history, and is a professor of politics at the Kanto Gakuin University. He has been conducting research on the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia, Japanese war crimes, and war crimes trials including the subject of comfort women.
Go to Profile#520
Michael Wolffsohn
#5342
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Michael Wolffsohn is a German historian. Wolffsohn was born in Tel Aviv, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and today is Israel. His parents were German Jews who fled in 1939. In 1954, the Wolffsohns moved to Germany, settling in West Berlin. In 1966, Wolffsohn began his studies at the Free University of Berlin and continued his studies at Tel Aviv University and Columbia University. He obtained a PhD in History in 1975. From 1967 to 1970, Wolffsohn served in the Israeli Defence Forces. From 1975 until 1980, Wolffsohn taught at the University of the Saarland. Since 1981, Wolffs...
Go to Profile#521
Dan Flores
#22010
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Dan Louie Flores is an American writer and historian who specializes in cultural and environmental studies of the American West. He held the A.B. Hammond Chair in Western History at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana until he retired in May 2014.
Go to Profile#522
Gary Okihiro
#33509
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Gary Y. Okihiro is an American author and scholar. Currently at Yale, he was a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University in New York City and the founding director of Columbia's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Okihiro received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1976.
Go to Profile#523
Fergus Millar
#20534
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Sir Fergus Graham Burtholme Millar, was a British ancient historian and academic. He was Camden Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford between 1984 and 2002. He numbers among the most influential ancient historians of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#524
Terence Ranger
#27366
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Terence "Terry" Osborn Ranger was a prominent British Africanist, best known as a historian of Zimbabwe. Part of the post-colonial generation of historians, his work spanned the pre- and post-Independence period in Zimbabwe, from the 1960s to the present. He published and edited dozens of books and wrote hundreds of articles and book chapters, including co-editing The Invention of Tradition with Eric Hobsbawm. He was the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at the University of Oxford and the first Africanist fellow of the British Academy.
Go to Profile#525
Ray Huang
#7055
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
Ray Huang was a Chinese-American historian and philosopher who was an officer in the National Revolutionary Army and fought in the Burma Campaign. In 1964, Huang earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan. He worked with Joseph Needham and was a contributor to Needham's Science and Civilisation in China. Huang taught history at universities in the US and the UK, and he is best known in his later years for the idea of macro-history.
Go to Profile#526
Sheila Rowbotham
#11071
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sheila Rowbotham is an English socialist feminist theorist and historian. Early life Rowbotham was born on 27 February 1943 in Leeds , the daughter of a salesman for an engineering company and an office clerk. From an early age, she was deeply interested in history. She has written that traditional political history "left her cold", but she credited Olga Wilkinson, one of her teachers, with encouraging her interest in social history by showing that history "belonged to the present, not to the history textbooks".
Go to Profile#527
Michael Berenbaum
#6102
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael Berenbaum is an American scholar, professor, rabbi, writer, and filmmaker, who specializes in the study of the Holocaust. He served as deputy director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust , Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , and Director of the USHMM's Holocaust Research Institute .
Go to Profile#528
Michael Wood
#11324
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Michael David Wood, is an English historian and broadcaster. He has presented numerous well-known television documentary series from the late 1970s to the present day. Wood has also written a number of books on English history, including In Search of the Dark Ages, The Domesday Quest, The Story of England, and In Search of Shakespeare. He was appointed Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester in 2013.
Go to Profile#529
Timothy D. Snyder
#9029
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
#530
William J. Duiker
#19063
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
William J. Duiker is a former United States Foreign Service officer and is currently Liberal Arts Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at Penn State University. His area of expertise is East Asia; while in the Foreign Service, he was stationed in Taiwan , the Republic of Vietnam, and Washington, D.C.. After leaving the State Department in 1965, he received his PhD degree in East Asian studies at Georgetown University.
Go to Profile#531
Moishe Postone
#6378
Overall Influence
1942 - 2018 (76 years)
Moishe Postone was a Canadian historian and social theorist. He was a professor of history at the University of Chicago, where he was part of the Committee on Jewish Studies. Life and career Postone was born on April 17, 1942, the son of a Canadian rabbi. He received his PhD from University of Frankfurt in 1983.
Go to Profile#532
Amélie Kuhrt
#27593
Overall Influence
1944 - 2023 (79 years)
Amélie Kuhrt FBA was a British historian and specialist in the history of the ancient Near East. Kuhrt was educated at King's College London, University College London and SOAS. Professor Emerita at University College London, she specialised in the social, cultural and political history of the region from c. 3000–100 BC, especially the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and Seleucid empires.
Go to Profile#533
Yasmin Khan
#32421
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Yasmin Khan is a historian of British India and Associate Professor of History at Kellogg College, Oxford. Education and career Born in 1977 to Pakistani and Anglo-Irish parents in Kingston-upon-Thames, Khan completed her BA in history at St Peter's College, Oxford. Khan completed her DPhil at St Anthony's College, Oxford in 2005 in Imperial and Commonwealth History.
Go to Profile#534
Frank Freidel
#18215
Overall Influence
1916 - 1993 (77 years)
Frank Burt Freidel, Jr. was an American historian, the first major biographer of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and one of the first scholars to work on his papers stored in the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York.
Go to Profile#535
Peniel E. Joseph
#18295
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Peniel E. Joseph is an American scholar, teacher, and public voice on race issues especially the history of the Black power movement. He holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in at the University of Texas at Austin . Joseph joined UT Austin in 2015 from Tufts University in Massachusetts, where he had founded the school's Center for the Study of Race and Democracy . He founded the second Center for the Study of Race and Democracy on the University of Texas campus in 2016, and is director of the center.
Go to Profile#536
Martin J. Sherwin
#7670
Overall Influence
1937 - 2021 (84 years)
Martin Jay Sherwin was an American historian. His scholarship mostly concerned the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation. He served on the faculty at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, Berkeley, and as the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History at Tufts University, where he founded the Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center.
Go to Profile#537
Albert Hourani
#6945
Overall Influence
1915 - 1993 (78 years)
Albert Habib Hourani was a Lebanese British historian, specialising in the history of the Middle East and Middle Eastern studies. Background and education Hourani was born in Manchester, England, the son of Soumaya Rassi and Fadlo Hourani, immigrants from Marjeyoun in what is now South Lebanon . Fadlo had studied at what later became the American University of Beirut and settled in Manchester as a cotton merchant. Albert's brothers were George Hourani, philosopher, historian, and classicist, and Cecil Hourani, economic adviser to President of Tunisia Habib Bourguiba. His family had converted...
Go to Profile#538
Lawrence Freedman
#6907
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sir Lawrence David Freedman, is a British academic, historian and author specialising in foreign policy, international relations and strategy. He has been described as the "dean of British strategic studies" and was a member of the Iraq Inquiry. He is an Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London.
Go to Profile#539
Alf Lüdtke
#22658
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Alf Lüdtke was a historian and a leading German representative of the history of everyday life . He said his main fields of interest and research include work as a social practice, the connection of production and destruction through "work", forms of taking part and acquiescing in European dictatorships in the 20th century, and remembering and memorialising forms of dealing with war and genocide in the modern era.
Go to Profile#540
Robert M. Levine
#10223
Overall Influence
1941 - 2003 (62 years)
Robert M. Levine was an American historian, Gabelli Senior Scholar in the Arts and Sciences, Director of Latin American Studies, and professor of history at the University of Miami. His interests were related to Latin America, in particular, Brazilian cultural and political history, Jewish diasporas in Latin America, Cuban history, and Latin American history in general.
Go to Profile#541
Pauline Maier
#13498
Overall Influence
1938 - 2013 (75 years)
Pauline Alice Maier was a revisionist historian of the American Revolution, whose work also addressed the late colonial period and the history of the United States after the end of the Revolutionary War. She was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
Go to Profile#542
Adrian Goldsworthy
#20019
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Adrian Keith Goldsworthy is a British historian and novelist who specialises in ancient Roman history. Education Adrian Goldsworthy attended Westbourne School, Penarth. He then read Ancient and Modern History at St John's College, Oxford, completing a D.Phil. in ancient military history from the University of Oxford in 1994. That dissertation laid the foundation of his first book, The Roman Army at War 100 BC – AD 200.
Go to Profile#543
Jan E. Goldstein
#21162
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jan Ellen Goldstein is an American intellectual historian of Modern Europe. She is the Norman and Edna Freehling Professor of History at the University of Chicago, and co-editor of the Journal of Modern History.
Go to Profile#544
Manning Clark
#8014
Overall Influence
1915 - 1991 (76 years)
Charles Manning Hope Clark, was an Australian historian and the author of the best-known general history of Australia, his six-volume A History of Australia, published between 1962 and 1987. He has been described as "Australia's most famous historian", but his work has been the target of much criticism, particularly from conservative and classical liberal academics and philosophers.
Go to Profile#545
George Saliba
#10611
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
George Saliba is an American historian who is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University, New York, where he has been since 1979. Saliba is currently the founding director of the Farouk Jabre Center for Arabic & Islamic Science & Philosophy and the Jabre-Khwarizmi Chair in the History Department.
Go to Profile#546
Richard Bushman
#15028
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Richard Lyman Bushman is an American historian and Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, having previously taught at Brigham Young University, Harvard University, Boston University, and the University of Delaware. Bushman is the author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, an important biography of Joseph Smith, progenitor of the Latter Day Saint movement. Bushman also was an editor for the Joseph Smith Papers Project and now serves on the national advisory board. Bushman has been called "one of the most important scholars of American religious history" of the late-20th century.
Go to Profile#547
Eric H. Cline
#23445
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Eric H. Cline is an American author, historian, archaeologist, and professor of ancient history and archaeology at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he is Professor of Classics and Anthropology and the former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, as well as Director of the GWU Capitol Archaeological Institute. He is also the advisor for the undergraduate archaeology majors, for which he was awarded the GWU Award for "Excellence in Undergraduate Departmental Advising" . Cline served as co-editor of the Bulletin of the Amer...
Go to Profile#548
Taras Hunczak
#18304
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Taras Hunczak is a historian, and professor emeritus at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. He lectures in Ukrainian, Russian, and East-European history. Hunczak has written extensively on Ukrainian history, the twentieth century in particular. He has also had involvement with the United Nations, notably moderating a discussion panel at an event marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Go to Profile#549
Steven Ozment
#16188
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Steven Edgar Ozment was an American historian of early modern and modern Germany, the European family, and the Protestant Reformation. From 1990 to 2015, he was the McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus until his death on December 12, 2019.
Go to Profile#550
Benzion Netanyahu
#5927
Overall Influence
1910 - 2012 (102 years)
Benzion Netanyahu was an Israeli encyclopedist, historian, and medievalist. He served as a professor of history at Cornell University. A scholar of Judaic history, he was also an activist in the Revisionist Zionism movement, who lobbied in the United States to support the creation of the Jewish state. His field of expertise was the history of the Jews in Spain. He was an editor of the Hebrew Encyclopedia and assistant to Benjamin Azkin, Ze'ev Jabotinsky's personal secretary.
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