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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.

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List of the most influential people in History,

#6401

Robert Pierpont Blake

Robert Pierpont Blake

1886 - 1950 (64 years)

Robert Pierpont Blake was an American byzantinist and scholar of the Armenian and Georgian cultures. Biography Robert P. Blake was born in San Francisco on November 1, 1886. As a John Harvard Traveling Fellow, he chiefly studied and worked, between 1911 and 1918, in Russia where he mastered Russian and began his study of Arabic, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian.

#6402

Charles Henry Oldfather

1887 - 1954 (67 years)

Charles Henry Oldfather was an American professor of Greek and Ancient History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He was born in Tabriz, Persia. Parentage Oldfather's parents, Jeremiah and Felicia, were missionaries in Persia for 19 years. They emigrated to the United States when Charles was aged two years. His father was born in Farmsberg, Ohio in 1842 and his mother was from Covington, Indiana.

#6403

Bell I. Wiley

1906 - 1980 (74 years)

Bell Irvin Wiley was an American historian who specialized in the American Civil War and was an authority on military history and the social history of common people. He died in Atlanta, Georgia, from a heart attack.

#6404

Hans W. Gatzke

1915 - 1987 (72 years)

Hans Wilhelm Gatzke was a German-born historian of German foreign policy since World War I and belonged to the young emigrants from Nazi Germany who became historians in the United States. He is remembered by a named professorship in his honor at Williams College and a named dissertation prize at Yale University.

#6405

Dorothy Whitelock

1901 - 1982 (81 years)

Dorothy Whitelock, was an English historian. From 1957 to 1969, she was the Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Cambridge. Her best-known work is English Historical Documents, vol. I: c. 500-1042, which she edited. It is a compilation of translated sources, with introductions.

#6406

Pierre Wuilleumier

1904 - 1979 (75 years)

Pierre Wuilleumier was a 20th-century French scholar, normalian, professor of Latin language and literature at the Sorbonne and archaeologist. Biography Pierre Wuilleumier held the chair of National Antiquities in Lyon from 1933. In 1940, he was responsible for the excavations of the ancient Theatre of Fourvière on the hill of Fourvière with Amable Audin. From 1941 to 1954, he directed two constituencies of Historic Antiquities in the Lyon region. He contributed to the magazine Gallia since its creation in 1942, in which he regularly published the results of excavations on the hill of Fourviè...

#6407

Arrell Gibson

1921 - 1987 (66 years)

Arrell Morgan Gibson was a historian and author specializing in the history of the state of Oklahoma. Gibson was born in Pleasanton, Kansas on December 1, 1921. He earned degrees from Missouri Southern State College and the University of Oklahoma. He is best known for writing Oklahoma: A History of Five Centuries and The Oklahoma Story . He died in Norman, Oklahoma on November 30, 1987. There have been two literary awards created in Gibson's honor. The Oklahoma Center For The Book grants its Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award annually to an Oklahoman for a body of literary work. The...

#6408

Lao Genevra Simons

1870 - 1949 (79 years)

Lao Genevra Simons also referred to as Lao G. Simons, was an American mathematician, writer, and historian of mathematics known for her influential book Fabre and Mathematics and Other Essays. Simons was head of the mathematics department at Hunter College in New York.

#6409

Sidney Painter

1902 - 1960 (58 years)

Sidney Painter was an American medievalist and historian. He was a fellow of the Mediaeval Academy and professor of history and chairman of the department of history at Johns Hopkins University. Life and career Painter was born in New York City; after the Taft School he attended Yale University . He was an influential member of American academia in the 1950s and served on many boards and committees. He was treasurer and secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies and was a member of the council of the Mediaeval Academy. He was made a fellow in 1953. That same year, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

#6410

Walter Houghton

1904 - 1983 (79 years)

Walter Edwards Houghton was an American historian of Victorian literature, best known for editing the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. Biography Houghton was educated at Yale University, where he graduated in 1924 and was a member of Skull and Bones. He taught at Harvard University before moving to Wellesley College in 1942. He remained at Wellesley until retirement in 1969. With his wife Esther he continued to work on the Wellesley Index: three volumes appeared before his death, and two more volumes were completed for publication after his death.

#6411

Henrietta Larson

1894 - 1983 (89 years)

Henrietta Melia Larson was an American business historian. Life and work Henrietta Melia Larson was born in Ostrander, Minnesota on 24 September 1894 to Hans Olaf Larson and Maria Karen Nordgarden . Her sister was Agnes Larson. She received her B.A. from St. Olaf College in 1918 and taught one year of high school before she became an instructor at Augustana College in 1921–22. She studied at the University of Minnesota in 1922–24, then taught at Bethany College from 1925 to 1926. Larson received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and The Wheat Market and the Farmer in Minnesota, 1858–1900 in 1926.

#6412

Jean-Rémy Palanque

1898 - 1988 (90 years)

Jean-Rémy Palanque was a professor of ancient history at the Faculty of Letters at Montpellier, then at the University of Aix-en-Provence. He was a member of the Institute, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and president of the Society of Religious History of France. He contributed, with Henri-Irénée Marrou, to the renewal of the historical interpretation of the Roman Empire and early Christianity. He has translated and completed in French the works by the Austrian historian Ernst Stein, who was devoted to the history of late antiquity. He was awarded the Medal of the Resistance in 1945.

#6413

Newman Ivey White

1892 - 1948 (56 years)

Newman Ivey White was an American professor of English at Duke University. He was born in Statesville, North Carolina, United States. He was a noted Shelley scholar, as well as a collector of American folklore, including folk songs and Duke limericks. He served as Professor of English at Trinity College and Duke University from 1919 to 1948. He wrote American Negro Folk Songs and in it he quoted a work song, sung by laborers in Augusta, Georgia, which mentioned the notorious Judge Fogarty. White also recalled hearing a version in Statesville, North Carolina in 1903.

#6414

Andrew J. Newman

1900 - Present (126 years)

Andrew J. Newman holds the chair of Islamic Studies and Persian at the University of Edinburgh. Education and career Newman majored in history at Dartmouth College, graduating summa cum laude. He went to the University of California, Los Angeles for graduate study in Islamic studies, and earned his Ph.D. there. After postdoctoral research at Green Templeton College, Oxford, affiliated with Oxford's Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, he joined the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1996.

#6415

William Harris Stahl

1908 - 1969 (61 years)

William Harris Stahl was an American historian of science and professor of classics at New York University and Brooklyn College, known for his translation of Macrobius' Commentary on the Dream of Scipio and his 1962 book Roman Science.

#6416

Heinrich Wieleitner

1874 - 1931 (57 years)

Heinrich Wieleitner was a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He became an honorary professor of mathematics at the University of Munich but for much of his career worked in school- and college-level education.

#6417

A. M. Woodward

1883 - 1973 (90 years)

Arthur Maurice Woodward was a British archaeologist and ancient historian who was director of the British School at Athens from 1923 to 1929. He was later head of the department of ancient history at the University of Sheffield. During the First World War he served with the British Army in the British Salonika Force and was mentioned in despatches.

#6418

J. P. V. D. Balsdon

1901 - 1977 (76 years)

John Percy Vyvian Dacre Balsdon, FBA , known as J. P. V. D. Balsdon in his academic work and otherwise as Dacre Balsdon, was an English ancient historian and writer. He was a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, from 1927 to 1969, and president of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies from 1968 to 1971.

#6419

Conyers Read

1881 - 1959 (78 years)

Conyers Read was an American historian who specialized in the History of England in the 15th and 16th centuries. A professor of history at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, he was president of the American Historical Association for the year 1949–1950.

#6420

Michael Flinn

1917 - 1983 (66 years)

Michael Walter Flinn was a British economic historian. Born into a middle-class family in Chorlton-on-Medlock, he was educated at William Hulme's Grammar School in Manchester, serving as an officer in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War. After the end of the war, Flinn took a history degree at the University of Manchester before spending two years as a grammar school teacher while writing a postgraduate dissertation in his spare time. In 1959, he began lecturing at the University of Edinburgh, writing an introductory school textbook for history in 1961, which was still in print at his death.

#6421

Joseph Ward Swain

1891 - 1971 (80 years)

#6422

Albert Howe Lybyer

1879 - 1949 (70 years)

Albert Howe Lybyer was a scholar of the history of the Middle East and the Balkans. Lybyer taught medieval and modern European history at Oberlin College from 1909 to 1913, and also held teaching positions at Robert College of Istanbul , Harvard University and the University of Illinois . He served as a technical advisor to the King–Crane Commission in 1919.

#6423

William Linn Westermann

William Linn Westermann

1873 - 1954 (81 years)

William Linn Westermann was an American historian and papyrologist who served as the president of the American Historical Association in 1944. He was regarded as an expert on the economy of the ancient world.

#6424

Sydney Checkland

1916 - 1986 (70 years)

Sydney George Checkland FRSE was a British-Canadian economic historian. Life Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Checkland worked at the Bank of Nova Scotia, then the Ottawa Sanitary Laundry Company, while he gained associate membership of the Canadian Bankers' Association. In 1938, he moved to England to study at the University of Birmingham, and in his final year served as President of the Guild of Students at the university. In 1941, he was elected as President of the National Union of Students, serving for only one year before becoming President of the International Council of Students.

#6425

Michael Crowder

1934 - 1988 (54 years)

Michael Crowder was a British historian and author notable for his books on the history of Africa and particularly on the history of West Africa. Early life and education Michael was born in London and educated at Mill Hill School. After earning a first class honours degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Hertford College, Oxford in 1957, he returned to Lagos to become first Editor of Nigeria Magazine in 1959.

#6426

Stanley Pargellis

Stanley Pargellis

1898 - 1968 (70 years)

Stanley McCrory Pargellis was an American historian and librarian. His work as a historian focused mainly on the military history of the American colonial era. From 1942 to 1962, he was director of the Newberry Library in Chicago.

#6427

Frances Yates

1899 - 1981 (82 years)

Dame Frances Amelia Yates was an English historian of the Renaissance, who wrote books on the history of esotericism. After attaining an MA in French at University College London, she began to publish her research in scholarly journals and academic books, focusing on 16th-century theatre and the life of the linguist and lexicographer John Florio. In 1941, she was employed by the Warburg Institute in London, and began to work on what she termed "Warburgian history", emphasising a pan-European and inter-disciplinary approach to historiography.

#6428

Ernst Kantorowicz

1895 - 1963 (68 years)

Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz was a German historian of medieval political and intellectual history and art, known for his 1927 book Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite on Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and The King's Two Bodies on medieval and early modern ideologies of monarchy and the state. He was an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#6429

Ralph Marcus

1900 - 1956 (56 years)

Ralph Marcus was an American classical philologist and historian of Hellenistic Judaism and the Second Temple period. He is most known for his Loeb Classical Library translations of works of the Jewish authors Josephus and Philo of Alexandria from Koine Greek and Classical Armenian into English.

#6430

Peter Charanis

1905 - 1985 (80 years)

Peter Charanis , born Panagiotis Charanis , was a Greek-born American scholar of Byzantium and the Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University. Charanis was long associated with the Dumbarton Oaks research library.

#6431

Dexter Perkins

1889 - 1984 (95 years)

Dexter Perkins was a historian who served as Professor and Chairman of the Department of American History at the University of Rochester, before leaving for Cornell. Biography Born in Boston, and educated at Boston Latin School, Perkins received his A.B. and PhD from Harvard University, where he was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa. In his doctoral studies, Archibald Cary Coolidge was a formative influence.

#6432

George Hubbard Blakeslee

1871 - 1954 (83 years)

George Hubbard Blakeslee was an academic, professor of history and international relations at Clark University, and a founder of the Journal of Race Development, the first American journal devoted to international relations. This journal was later renamed the Journal of International Relations, which in turn was merged with Foreign Affairs.

#6433

Howard Hayes Scullard

1903 - 1983 (80 years)

Howard Hayes Scullard was a British historian specialising in ancient history, notable for editing the Oxford Classical Dictionary and for his many published works. Life and career Scullard's father was Herbert Hayes Scullard, a minister, and his mother Barbara Louisa Dodds.

#6434

Harold J. Grimm

1901 - 1983 (82 years)

Harold J. Grimm was an academic, historian, and writer and an expert on the Reformation. Born in Saginaw in Michigan in 1901, Grimm gained his PhD at Ohio State University. Grimm's numerous posts as an educator included Professor of History at Capital University, the Ohio State University, and Indiana University. He was department chairman at Ohio State and Indiana universities. In 1978, Grimm received the Distinguished Teacher award at Ohio State University. He was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow at the University of Freiburg.

#6435

Jaime Eyzaguirre

Jaime Eyzaguirre

1908 - 1968 (60 years)

Jaime Eyzaguirre was a Chilean lawyer, essayist and historian. He is variously recognized as a writer of Spanish traditionalist or conservative historiography in his country. Early life and marriage Eyzaguirre was born into a religious upper-class family in Santiago. As young man he studied law in the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and was member of the Catholic student organization Asociación Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos. During his studies he was influenced by the Jesuit Fernando Vives and the writings of Manuel Lacunza.

#6436

Charles Higounet

1911 - 1988 (77 years)

Charles Higounet was a French historian medievalist, specialising in bastides and the Middle Ages in the south-west of France. Biography Charles Higounet was a French medievalist who taught in Bordeaux III University from 1946 to 1979, where a research center was named after him. He used to be a specialist of bastides and the history of south-west France, and he was especially noticed after his history of Bordeaux, for which he won the historical prize, Grand prix Gobert, in 1973. He also led a team that worked on a historical atlas for French cities. He also wrote a volume of the "Que sais-je?" on various forms of writing.

#6437

Hugh Seton-Watson

1916 - 1984 (68 years)

George Hugh Nicolas Seton-Watson, CBE, FBA was a British historian and political scientist specialising in Russia. Early life Seton-Watson was one of the two sons of Robert William Seton-Watson, the activist and historian. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, graduating in 1938 with First Class Honours in 'Modern Greats' .

#6438

Clarence H. Haring

1885 - 1960 (75 years)

Clarence Henry Haring was an important historian of Latin America and a pioneer in initiating the study of Latin American colonial institutions among scholars in the United States. Early life and education The son of a businessman, Henry Getman Haring, and Amelia Stoneback, Clarence Haring received his bachelor of arts degree in modern languages from Harvard University in 1907. Selected for a Rhodes Scholarship in 1907, he studied under Professor Sir Charles Harding Firth at Oxford University from 1907 to 1910, where he was a member of New College. Under Firth's guidance, Haring produced his first book on The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century.

#6439

Joseph Rayback

1914 - 1983 (69 years)

Joseph G. Rayback was a professor of history in the United States. Career He served in the United States Navy and earned a Ph.D. in American history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. For many years, he was a professor of history and chair of the department at Pennsylvania State University. He was faculty advisor to Phi Alpha Theta, the honorary in history and with Donald B. Hoffmann helped to organize the society on a national basis. He served on the editorial board of the journal, The Historian, published by Phi Alpha Theta. Following service at Penn State, Rayback taught American history at the University of Saskatchewan in western Canada.

#6440

Charles Howard McIlwain

1871 - 1968 (97 years)

Charles Howard McIlwain was an American historian and political scientist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1924. He was educated at Princeton University and Harvard University and taught at both institutions, as well as the University of Oxford, Miami University, and Bowdoin College. Though he trained as a lawyer, his career was mostly academic, devoted to constitutional history. He was a member of several learned societies and served as president of the American Historical Association in 1935–1936.

#6441

Edward Mead Earle

1894 - 1954 (60 years)

Edward Mead Earle was an American author and university lecturer who specialized in the role of the military in foreign relations. He was a consultant to various departments of the U.S. government, especially during World War II. For twenty years he was a professor in the School of Economics and Politics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

#6442

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.

#6443

Ola Elizabeth Winslow

1885 - 1977 (92 years)

Ola Elizabeth Winslow was an American historian, biographer, and educator. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for her biography of Jonathan Edwards, an 18th-century American theologian whose basic writings she edited for Signet Classics.

#6444

Heinz Heimsoeth

1886 - 1975 (89 years)

Heinz Heimsoeth was a German historian of philosophy. Biography He was born in Cologne. Heimsoeth began his studies at Heidelberg in 1905, but soon transferred to Berlin, where he studied with Wilhelm Dilthey, Alois Riehl, and Ernst Cassirer. Due to his interest in Kant he transferred in 1907 to Marburg, where he studied with Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. He graduated in 1911 with a thesis on Descartes. After a year studying in Paris with Henri Bergson he was habilitated with a thesis on Leibniz.

#6445

Malcolm Caldwell

1931 - 1978 (47 years)

James Alexander Malcolm Caldwell was a Scottish academic and a prolific Marxist writer. He was a consistent critic of American foreign policy, a campaigner for Asian communist and socialist movements and a supporter of the Khmer Rouge. Caldwell was murdered under mysterious circumstances a few hours after meeting Pol Pot in Cambodia.

#6446

Lilian Knowles

1870 - 1926 (56 years)

Lilian Charlotte Anne Knowles was a British historian and Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics in the 1920s. She was the first female Dean of the Economic History Faculty in the University of London.

#6447

Walter S. Huxford

1892 - 1958 (66 years)

Walter Scott Huxford was an American professor of physics at Northwestern University and was a co-inventor of the sunburnometer. Education His education included a bachelor's degree at Doane College, a master's degree at the University of Nebraska, and a PhD degree at the University of Michigan in 1928, with a thesis entitled: Determination of the Charge of Positive Thermions form Measurements of the Shot Effect.

#6448

George Sarton

1884 - 1956 (72 years)

George Alfred Leon Sarton was a Belgian-American chemist and historian. He is considered the founder of the discipline of the history of science as an independent field of study. His most influential works were the Introduction to the History of Science, which consists of three volumes and 4,296 pages and the journal Isis. Sarton ultimately aimed to achieve an integrated philosophy of science that provided a connection between the sciences and the humanities, which he referred to as "the new humanism".

#6449

Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

1877 - 1934 (57 years)

#6450

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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