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,
#6351
Margaret R. Yocom
#125172
Overall Influence
Margaret R. Yocom is a folklorist, and poet. Now emerita, she taught at George Mason University from 1977 to 2013 and founded the Folklore Studies Program there. She works in Maine. Early life and education Born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, United States, the eldest child of Betty Keck and Norman Davidheiser Yocom, she first pursued her interest in folklore at Pennsylvania State University where she majored in English She went on to University of Massachusetts Amherst where she completed an MA. in English and then a PhD in English with a concentration in Folklore. While at U Mass, she wrote h...
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Lerna Ekmekçioğlu
#192094
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Lerna Ekmekçioğlu is a historian and author of Turkish–Armenian origin. She is a faculty member at MIT. She works on the history of Armenians and Turks in the 20th century. Works
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Michelle Bubenicek
#122767
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Michelle Bubenicek is a French medievalist historian. She was appointed director of the École Nationale des Chartes on 1 September 2016. Works Books 2002: 2013: 2014: 2016: 2016: Pamphlet 1996: Awards Prix Madeleine-Lenoir 2002 de la Société de l'École des chartes pour Quand les femmes gouvernent, droit et politique au XIV.
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Per Thomas Andersen
#134911
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Per Thomas Andersen is a Norwegian literary historian and novelist. He was appointed professor at the University of Tromsø from 1992, and at the University of Oslo from 1993. His thesis from 1992 treated the decadence of Scandinavian literature of the period from 1880 to 1900. Among his other scientific works are Stein Mehren – en logosdikter from 1982, Norsk litteraturhistorie from 2001, and Tankevaser from 2003. He published the novels Hold in 1985 and Arr in 1992. He is a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
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Nathalie Beaux-Grimal
#121649
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Nathalie Beaux-Grimal is a French Egyptologist, a research associate at the Collège de France and the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo . She was educated at Yale University and obtained a Ph.D. in Egyptology under Jean-Claude Goyon in Lumière University Lyon 2 with a thesis on the Botanical Garden of the Precinct of Amun-Re at Karnak . From 1997 to 2005, she was French coordinator of Egyptology in the Faculty of Archeology at Cairo University in Giza. As part of the excavations of the IFAO, she participated in an expedition to the site of Deir el-Bahari, in collaboration with Janusz Karkowski of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology of the University of Warsaw .
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Jerzy Snopek
#120900
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Jerzy Snopek is a Polish literary historian and translator. He served as an ambassador to Hungary from 2016 to 2022. Life Snopek graduated from Polish philology at the University of Warsaw. He gained there also doctoral degree. In 1993, he received his post-doctoral degree at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, presenting a dissertation on the literary life in the Kraków area from 1750 to 1815.
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Günter Philipp
#177375
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Günter Philipp was a German pianist, musicologist, composer and amateur painter. Life Born in Sohland an der Spree, Philipp grew up in Riesa, Oppach and Bautzen. Attracted by music and figure drawing, he was instructed by Rudolf Warnecke in nature study and visual art. In post-war Germany, forced labour damaged his left hand. Nevertheless, he became a student in Leipzig in 1947, a pupil of Hugo Steurer and Wilhelm Weismann . In 1948, he was able to enrol at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig and begin studying with Heinz Eberhard Strüning. For financial reasons, he had to break off his studies in 1949 and make a living as a freelance artist in Oppach.
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Piero Camporesi
#87215
Overall Influence
1926 - 1997 (71 years)
Piero Camporesi was an Italian historian of literature and an anthropologist. He was a professor of Italian literature at the University of Bologna. Works Il Brodo Indiano La casa dell'eternità Le officine dei sensi Il sugo della vita Bread of DreamsLa terra e la luna: alimentazione folclore societa "Petrarca 66: l'aer gravato e l'importuna nebbia" "Giuseppe D'Alessandro poeta barocco tra seicento e settecento" "Biltri, blittri" Il tema dell'Adynaton nel Canzoniere del Petrarca "Una lettera inedita di Lodovico di Breme al Ginguene" "Documenti per la storia del romanticismo italiano: pensieri...
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Byrd Gibbens
#185858
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Byrd Gibbens is an American historian and professor. Career she was a professor of English at the University of New Mexico. Selected publications This is a Strange Country: Letters of a Westering Family, 1880-1906 Far from Home: Families of the Westward Journey by Lillian Schlissel, Byrd Gibbens, and Elizabeth Hampsten
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María del Carmen Rovira Gaspar
#187202
Overall Influence
1923 - 2021 (98 years)
María del Carmen Rovira Gaspar was a Spanish historian, researcher and academic. She arrived in Mexico in 1939, after the National victory in Spain.
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Isaac Lipschits
#181686
Overall Influence
1930 - 2008 (78 years)
Isaac Lipschits was a Dutch-Jewish historian and political scientist. He survived World War II by hiding from the Nazis and their collaborators. He published many books from 1962 to 2008. Books 1962: La politique de la France au Levant 1939-1941 1966: Honderd jaar NIW: het Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad, 1865-19651967: Het kapitaal: kritiek van de politieke economie; Dl.1: Het productieproces van het kapitaal1971: Simulaties in de internationale politiek1977: Politieke stromingen in Nederland: inleiding tot de geschiedenis van de Nederlandse politieke partijen1977: Ontstaansgeschiedenis van de ...
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Dagfinn Mannsåker
#180132
Overall Influence
1916 - 1994 (78 years)
Dagfinn Mannsåker was a Norwegian archivist and historian. He was born at Ullensvang in Hordaland, Norway. He was the brother of Bergfrid Fjose. He took the dr.philos. degree in 1955, on the thesis Det norske presteskapet i det nittande hundreåret. Sosialhistoriske studiar. He worked as a school teacher from 1954 to 1959, lecturer at the University of Oslo from 1959 to 1965 and national archivist from 1965 to 1982. He edited the academic journal Historisk Tidsskrift for many years, and contributed to Norsk Biografisk Leksikon. From 1966 to 1972 he chaired the Norwegian Historical Association...
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Jonathan R. Lyon
#192275
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Jonathan R. Lyon is an American historian of medieval Europe. He is a professor of history at the University of Chicago. Bibliography Princely Brothers and Sisters: The Sibling Bond in German Politics, 1100-1250, Cornell University Press, 2012
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Luis Castro Leiva
#167974
Overall Influence
1943 - 1999 (56 years)
Luis Hernan Castro Leiva was a Venezuelan political philosopher, historian, writer and columnist. He is known for his televised speech on 23 January 1998 for the National Congress in which he warns against bolivarianism, cronyism and atavistic absolutism. He was one of the country's foremost advocates for democracy and an outspoken critic of Hugo Chávez, which he considered a populist. Castro is also credited with introducing rugby to Venezuela.
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Halina Szwarc
#42015
Overall Influence
1923 - 2002 (79 years)
Halina Szwarc de domo Kłąb - was a member of the Polish resistance during the Second World War, working undercover first under the pseudonym Ryszard, then Jacek II. Postwar, she became a professor of medicine in gerontology, and in 1970/1971, the prorector of the Józef Piłsudski University of Physical Education in Warsaw.
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Patrick Johansson
#89486
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Patrick Johansson Keraudren is a French-born naturalized Mexican academic, researcher and professor of Nahuatl language. He is a Doctor of Letters from the University of Paris. Since 1979, he is a researcher of the Institute of Historical Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and associate professor of Miguel Leon-Portilla in the Seminario de Cultura Nahuatl. Since 1992, he has taught Nahuatl literature at the Faculty of Arts at the same university.
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Alexander Anton
#169147
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Alexander Elder Anton, CBE, FBA , often known as Sandy Anton, was a Scottish legal scholar. Biography Anton was born on 2 July 1922. He served in the Gordon Highlanders from 1941 to 1945 and then attended the University of Aberdeen, where he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in 1946 and a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1949. He then practised as a solicitor in Aberdeen for four years before working as a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen from 1953 to 1959. Anton was Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow between 1959 and 1973.
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Kåre Langvik-Johannessen
#168676
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
Kåre Johannes Langvik-Johannessen was a Norwegian philologist, literary historian and translator. He was born in Onsøy as a son of manager Hans Johannessen and Betzy Langvik . He finished his secondary education in 1939 in Fredrikstad, and during the Second World War he studied piano and organ, and took commerce school. He enrolled in Norwegian studies at the University of Oslo in 1946, and graduated with the cand.mag. degree in 1948. The same year he travelled to the Hague to study Dutch language and literature. He took another degree at the University of Oslo in 1955 with the master's thesis Det bibelske drama i Nederlandene før Joost van den Vondel.
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Peter Krečič
#63712
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Peter Krečič is a Slovenian historian of art and architecture. He is a specialist on the life and work of architect Jože Plečnik, and has published numerous books on this topic, including Plecnik:The Complete Works and Plecnik's Ljubljana. He is the father of the writer Jela Krečič.
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Hans Georg Beck
#89006
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Hans-Georg Beck FBA was a German scholar, specializing in Byzantine studies. Biography He was born in Schneizlreuth, Bavaria in 1910. In 1929 he graduated from high school in Ettal. In 1930 he entered the Ludwig-Maximilian University, where in 1936 he defended his doctoral thesis in theology, "Vorhersehung und Vorherbestimmung in der theologischen Literatur der Byzantiner" , which was published in Rome the following year as volume 114 of the Orientalia Christiana Analecta series. In 1949 he defended his habilitated work "Theodoros Metochites. Die Krise des byzantinischen Weltbildes im 14. Jahrhundert" .
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Michael Foster
#192389
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
#6372
Bjarne Hodne
#190695
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Bjarne Hodne is a Norwegian folklorist. He defended his dr.philos. degree in 1973 with the thesis Personalhistoriske sagn. En studie i kildeverdi. He worked as a lecturer at the University of Oslo from 1975 to 1976, docent from 1976 to 1984 and professor from 1985. He was the dean of the Historical-Philosophical Faculty from 1991 to 1997. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 2007 he became leader of the trade union Norwegian Association of Researchers.
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Tenney Frank
1876 - 1939 (63 years)
Tenney Frank was a prominent American ancient historian and classical scholar. He studied many aspects of Ancient Rome, for instance its economy, imperialism, demographics and epigraphy. Biography Tenney Frank earned his A.B. at the University of Kansas in 1898 and A.M. the following year. Frank went on to receive his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1903. Frank taught at Bryn Mawr College as Professor of Latin from 1904 until 1919, when he moved to the Johns Hopkins University. At Bryn Mawr Frank wrote and published his influential study Roman Imperialism in 1914. Frank believed tha...
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Marion Thompson Wright
1904 - 1962 (58 years)
Marion Thompson Wright was an African-American scholar and activist. In 1940, Wright became the first African-American woman in the United States to earn her Ph.D. in history. Early life Marion Manola Thompson Wright was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on September 12, 1902, to Minnie Thompson and Moses R. Thompson. Wright was the youngest of four children, and had two older twin sisters and a brother who died at a young age.
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Joseph Needham
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, initiating publication of the multivolume Science and Civilisation in China. A focus of his was what has come to be called the Needham Question of why and how China had ceded its leadership in Science and Technology to Western countries.
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John Farquhar Fulton
1899 - 1960 (61 years)
John Farquhar Fulton was an American neurophysiologist and historian of science. He received numerous degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University. He taught at Magdalen College School of Medicine at Oxford and later became the youngest Sterling Professor of Physiology at Yale University. His main contributions were in primate neurophysiology and history of science.
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David Harris Willson
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
David Harris Willson was an American historian and professor who specialized in the history of 17th-century England. Early life and education Willson's progenitors bearing the Willson name first arrived from England in 1638, settling in Dedham, Massachusetts. Another English progenitor, John Harris, Sr., founded Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. David Harris Willson's parents were Thomas Harris Willson and Amelia Shryrock Willson. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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Charles A. Beard
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Charles Austin Beard was an American historian and professor, who wrote primarily during the first half of the 20th century. A history professor at Columbia University, Beard's influence is primarily due to his publications in the fields of history and political science. His works included a radical re-evaluation of the Founding Fathers of the United States, whom he believed to be more motivated by economics than by philosophical principles. Beard's most influential book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States , has been the subject of great controversy ever since its publication.
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Thomas McKeown
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
Thomas McKeown was a British physician, epidemiologist and historian of medicine. Largely based on demographic data from England and Wales, McKeown argued that the population growth since the late eighteenth century was due to improving economic conditions, i.e. better nutrition, rather than to better hygiene, public health measures and improved medicine . This became known as the "McKeown thesis".
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Reinhard H. Luthin
1905 - 1962 (57 years)
Reinhard Henry Luthin was a historian best known for his contribution to the study of President Abraham Lincoln. He was a professor of history at Columbia University, with a lifelong interest in facts regarding Lincoln's life and times.
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Mircea Eliade
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. A leading interpreter of religious experience, he established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most instrumental contributions to religious studies was his theory of eternal return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but actually parti...
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R. G. Collingwood
1889 - 1943 (54 years)
Robin George Collingwood was an English philosopher, historian and archaeologist. He is best known for his philosophical works, including The Principles of Art and the posthumously published The Idea of History .
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Samuel Eliot Morison
1887 - 1976 (89 years)
Samuel Eliot Morison was an American historian noted for his works of maritime history and American history that were both authoritative and popular. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912, and taught history at the university for 40 years. He won Pulitzer Prizes for Admiral of the Ocean Sea , a biography of Christopher Columbus, and John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography . In 1942, he was commissioned to write a history of United States naval operations in World War II, which was published in 15 volumes between 1947 and 1962. Morison wrote the popular Oxford History of the Ame...
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Arnold J. Toynbee
1889 - 1975 (86 years)
Arnold Joseph Toynbee was an English historian, a philosopher of history, an author of numerous books and a research professor of international history at the London School of Economics and King's College London. From 1918 to 1950, Toynbee was considered a leading specialist on international affairs; from 1924 to 1954 he was the Director of Studies at Chatham House, in which position he also produced 34 volumes of the Survey of International Affairs, a "bible" for international specialists in Britain.
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Ronald Syme
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Sir Ronald Syme, was a New Zealand-born historian and classicist. He was regarded as the greatest historian of ancient Rome since Theodor Mommsen and the most brilliant exponent of the history of the Roman Empire since Edward Gibbon. His great work was The Roman Revolution , a masterly and controversial analysis of Roman political life in the period following the assassination of Julius Caesar.
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Derek J. de Solla Price
1922 - 1983 (61 years)
Derek John de Solla Price was a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist. He was known for his investigation of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek planetary computer, and for quantitative studies on scientific publications, which led to his being described as the "Herald of scientometrics".
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James Henry Oliver
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
James Henry Oliver was an American ancient historian and epigrapher, especially notable for his work on Ancient Athens. Life Oliver was born on 26 April 1905 in New York City to James Henry Oliver and Louise McGratty. He completed his undergraduate studies at Yale in 1926 and his doctoral studies at the same university in 1931. His doctoral supervisors were George Lincoln Henderson and Michael Rostovtzeff. He was a visiting student at the University of Bonn for one year and the American Academy in Rome as Jesse R. Carter fellow 1928–30. After his doctorate, he taught at Yale and then served ...
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Conway Zirkle
1895 - 1972 (77 years)
Conway Zirkle was an American botanist and historian of science. Zirkle was professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He was highly critical of Lamarckism, Lysenkoism and Marxian biology.
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Kenneth Scott Latourette
1884 - 1968 (84 years)
Kenneth Scott Latourette was an American historian and professor, specialized in Chinese studies, Japanese studies, and the history of Christianity. His formative experiences as a Christian missionary and educator in early 20th-century Imperial China shaped his life's work. Although he did not learn the Chinese language, he became known for his study of the history of China, the history of Japan, his magisterial scholarly surveys on world Christianity, and of American relations with East Asia.
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A. H. M. Jones
1904 - 1970 (66 years)
Arnold Hugh Martin Jones FBA , known as A. H. M. Jones or Hugo Jones, was a prominent 20th-century British historian of classical antiquity, particularly of the later Roman Empire. Biography Jones's best-known work, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602 , is sometimes considered the definitive narrative history of late Rome and early Byzantium, beginning with the reign of the Roman tetrarch Diocletian and ending with that of the Byzantine emperor Maurice. One of the most common modern criticisms of this work is its almost total reliance on literary and epigraphic primary sources, a methodology which mirrored Jones's own historiographical training.
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William B. Willcox
1907 - 1985 (78 years)
William Bradford Willcox was an American historian. He was born in Ithaca, New York. He died in North Haven, Connecticut. Education: He received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1928 and studied at Cambridge University. At Yale University he studied architecture , and Tudor-Stuart English history . Wallace Notestein directed his dissertation, which was recognized as a pioneer study of government in Gloucestershire. The work received the distinguished John Addison Porter Prize for best work of scholarship in a given year.
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Crane Brinton
1898 - 1968 (70 years)
Clarence Crane Brinton was an American historian of France, as well as a historian of ideas. His most famous work, The Anatomy of Revolution likened the dynamics of revolutionary movements to the progress of fever.
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Broadus Mitchell
1892 - 1988 (96 years)
Broadus Mitchell was an 20th-century American historian, writer, professor, and 1934 Socialist Party candidate for governor of Maryland. Background John Broadus Mitchell was born on December 27, 1892, in Georgetown, Kentucky. His father was a professor of classical languages. He had three siblings. In 1913, he graduated from the University of South Carolina and in 1918 earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.
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John Bartlet Brebner
1895 - 1957 (62 years)
John Bartlet Brebner was a Canadian-born Canadian and American historian who spent the major part of his career in the United States. Born in Toronto and educated at the University of Toronto, St John's College, Oxford, and Columbia University, he taught at the University of Toronto between 1921 and 1925, when he moved to Columbia University where he spent the rest of his career. During the First World War, he served in the Canadian Army, before being commissioned into the British Army .
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Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor was an English geographer and historian of science, the first woman to hold an academic chair of geography in the United Kingdom. Taylor was educated at the Camden School for Girls, the North London Collegiate School, and Royal Holloway College. In 1903 she obtained a first class BSc in chemistry from the University of London. While teaching chemistry she studied at the University of Oxford and from 1908 to 1910 acted as research assistant to A. J. Herbertson, head of the Oxford Geography School. She wrote school geography textbooks in collaboration with J. F. Un...
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J. Fred Rippy
1892 - 1977 (85 years)
James Fred Rippy was an American professor, author, and historian of Latin America and American diplomacy. Biography J. Fred Rippy grew up on a subsistence farm in Tennessee until a fire destroyed several farm buildings and forced his parents in 1902 to move to Richardson, Texas to live with relatives. He graduated from high school in 1907 and in 1909 entered Southwestern University, where he graduated in 1913. After teaching for one year at Clebarro College in Cleburne, Texas, he enrolled at Vanderbilt University, where he received an M.A. after one year of study. In 1915 he married Mary Dozier Allen of Nashville, Tennessee.
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Rachel Moss
Rachel Moss is an Irish art historian and professor specialising in medieval art, with a particular interest in Insular art, medieval Irish Gospel books and monastic history. She is the current head of the Department of the History of Art at Trinity College Dublin, where she became a fellow in 2022.
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Archer Taylor
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Archer Taylor was one of America's "foremost specialists in American and European folklore", with a special interest in cultural history, literature, proverbs, riddles and bibliography. Early life and education Taylor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 1, 1890.
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Koppel Pinson
1904 - 1961 (57 years)
Koppel Shub Pinson was a historian who specialized in the origins of German nationalism. Early life Born in Postawy, Russian Empire , on February 11, 1904, Pinson immigrated to the United States with his family in 1907.
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Warren Ault
1887 - 1989 (102 years)
Warren Ortman Ault was an American historian, who taught at Boston University from 1913 to 1957. Life Ault graduated from Baker University in 1907, before studying at Jesus College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. While a student at Baker, he was a member of the local Zeta Chi fraternity. He then obtained a doctorate from Yale University in 1919, having served as a second lieutenant in the artillery in the First World War. He taught history at Boston University from 1913 to 1957, becoming William Edwards Huntington professor. He became an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford in 1971. He wa...
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