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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

Albert C. Baugh

1891 - 1981 (90 years)

Albert Croll Baugh was a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, best known as the author of a textbook for History of the English language . His A History of the English Language was first published in 1935 and praised as "worthy to take a place with the other great histories of single languages". It was revised by Baugh for a second edition published in 1957 and it remains in print, edited by Thomas Cable .

#6402

Morton W. Bloomfield

Morton W. Bloomfield

1913 - 1987 (74 years)

Morton W. Bloomfield was an American Medievalist. He was the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of English at Harvard University. He is best known for his scholarly work, teaching and mentoring on Medieval literature, language, as well as contributions to intellectual history, literary criticism and theory. He also was one of the founders of the first U.S. national center for the humanities, the National Humanities Center.

#6403

William L. Langer

1896 - 1977 (81 years)

William Leonard Langer was an American historian, intelligence analyst and policy advisor. He served as chairman of the history department at Harvard University. He was on leave during World War II as head of the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services. He was a specialist on the diplomacy of the periods 1840–1900 and World War II. He edited many books, including a series on European history, a large-scale reference book, and a university textbook.

#6404

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.

#6405

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.

#6406

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.

#6407

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' .

#6408

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.

#6409

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.

#6410

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.

#6411

William Abel Pantin

1902 - 1973 (71 years)

William Abel Pantin was a historian of medieval England who spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford. Life Pantin was born in Blackheath, south London, on 1 May 1902. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class degree in Modern History in 1923. He undertook research at the University of Oxford after winning a Bryce Research Studentship.

#6412

Antony Andrewes

1910 - 1990 (80 years)

Antony Andrewes, was an English classical scholar and historian. He was Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford from 1953 to 1977. Early life Andrewes was born in Tavistock, Devon, England, on 12 June 1910. He was educated at Winchester College from 1923 to 1929. He studied at New College, Oxford, between 1929 and 1933.

#6413

C. L. Mowat

1911 - 1970 (59 years)

Charles Loch Mowat was a British-born American historian. Biography Mowat was educated at Marlborough College and St John's College, Oxford. In 1934 he emigrated to the United States, where he became an American citizen. From 1934 until 1936 he taught at the University of Minnesota. In 1936 he took up a position at the University of California, Los Angeles. His opposition to McCarthyism led to him leaving UCLA and taking a post at the University of Chicago in 1950. In 1958 he returned to Britain to be professor of history at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, a post he held until ...

#6414

Cornelis de Kiewiet

Cornelis de Kiewiet

1902 - 1986 (84 years)

Cornelis Willem de Kiewiet was a Dutch-born American historian most notable for having served as president of Cornell University and the University of Rochester. Biography De Kiewiet was born in the Netherlands, but grew up in South Africa, where his father went as a diamond and gold-seeker and later worked as an employee of the Transvaal Republic's Railway. In the early 1920s, Cornelis earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and, in 1927, he earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of London.

#6415

Hans-Joachim Schoeps

1909 - 1980 (71 years)

Hans-Joachim Schoeps was a German-Jewish historian of religion and religious philosophy. He was professor of religions and religious history at the University of Erlangen. Prior to World War II, Schoeps was leader of The German Vanguard , an organization of 150 Jewish students, national conservative anti-Zionists who sought total assimilation into the German nation.

#6416

John Edwin Pomfret

John Edwin Pomfret

1898 - 1981 (83 years)

John Edwin Pomfret was an American academic and administrator who served as the director of the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery and the twentieth president of the College of William & Mary.

#6417

Francis Utley

1907 - 1974 (67 years)

Francis Lee Utley was a folklorist, linguist, medievalist, scholar of onomastics and literature, educator, and author. Life and career Born and raised in Watertown, Wisconsin, Utley attended the University of Wisconsin, from which he graduated with honors in 1929. He did his graduate literary studies at Harvard, earning the M.A. in 1934 and the Ph.D. in 1936. At Harvard, he came under the influence of George Lyman Kittredge in English who encouraged Utley's study of folklore. In 1936, he married Ruth Alice Scott and they had three children: Philip Lee, Andrew Scott, and Jean Marie.

#6418

George Sansom

1883 - 1965 (82 years)

Sir George Bailey Sansom was a British diplomat and historian of pre-modern Japan, particularly noted for his historical surveys and his attention to Japanese society and culture. Early life Sansom was born in London, where his father was a naval architect, but was educated in France and Germany, including the University of Giessen and the University of Marburg. He passed an examination for the Diplomatic Service in September 1903.

#6419

Jérôme Carcopino

Jérôme Carcopino

1881 - 1970 (89 years)

Jérôme Carcopino was a French historian and author. He was the fifteenth member elected to occupy seat 3 of the Académie française, in 1955. Biography Carcopino was born at Verneuil-sur-Avre, Eure, son of a doctor from a Corsican family related to Bonaparte, and educated at the École Normale Supérieure where he specialised in history. From 1904 to 1907 he was a member of the French School in Rome. In 1912 he was a professor of history in Le Havre. In 1912 he became a lecturer at the University of Algiers and inspector of antiquities in Algeria until 1920. His career was interrupted by World War I when he served in the Dardanelles.

#6420

Merritt Yerkes Hughes

1893 - 1971 (78 years)

Merritt Yerkes Hughes Hughes was an expert in the literature of France, England and Italy. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1925, the first year they were given. Life Hughes was born May 24, 1893, in Philadelphia; he received a bachelor's degree from Boston University in 1915, a master's degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1918, a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1921 and a D.Litt. from the University of Edinburgh in 1950.

#6421

Theodore Plucknett

Theodore Plucknett

1897 - 1965 (68 years)

Theodore Frank Thomas Plucknett was a British legal historian who was the first chair of legal history at the London School of Economics. Plucknett was born on 2 January 1897 in Bristol. Plucknett completed his early education at Alderman Newton's School in Leicester and then Bacup and Rawstenstall school in Newchurch, Lancashire. He completed his degree in history at London University and graduated with second class honours. He later completed his master's degree at University College London before his twenty-first birthday. He was also awarded the Alexander prize of the Royal Historical Society.

#6422

Gilbert Chinard

1881 - 1972 (91 years)

Gilbert Chinard was a French-American historian, professor emeritus, who authored over 40 books. Born on October 17, 1881, in Chatellerault, France, to Hilaire and Marie Chinard, educated at the Universities of Poitiers and Bordeaux, in 1908, he married Emma Blanchard, then moved to New York as a visiting instructor in French Literature, leading him in an American academic career, teaching positions at Brown University , the University of California, Berkeley , Johns Hopkins University , and Princeton University .

#6423

Marshall Hodgson

1922 - 1968 (46 years)

Marshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson , was an Islamic studies academic and a world historian at the University of Chicago. He was chairman of the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought in Chicago. Life Marshall Hodgson was born in Richmond, Indiana in April 11, 1922. He was a practicing Quaker and a strict vegetarian. He worked in the Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector from 1943 to 1946. In 1951, he received his PhD from the University of Chicago, where he later became professor, receiving tenure in 1961, becoming chairman of the Committee in Social Thought in 1964 and the newly established Committee on Near Eastern Studies in the same year.

#6424

Tyler Dennett

1883 - 1949 (66 years)

Tyler Dennett was an American historian and educator. He received the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1933 book John Hay: From Poetry to Politics. Early career and education Born in Wisconsin, but raised in Rhode Island, Dennett graduated high school as valedictorian from the Moses Brown School in Providence. In 1900, Dennett enrolled at Bates College and then transferred to Williams College as a sophomore. At Williams, he was a member of the football team. After his graduation in the spring of 1904 and a year of work in Williamstown, Massachusetts he attended the Union Theological Seminary, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Divinity in 1908.

#6425

Franz Altheim

1898 - 1976 (78 years)

Franz Altheim was a German classical philologist and historian who specialized in the history of classical antiquity. During the 1930s and 1940s, Altheim served the Nazi state as a member of Ahnenerbe, a think tank controlled by the Schutzstaffel , the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, and as a spy for the SS.

#6426

Dumas Malone

1892 - 1986 (94 years)

Dumas Malone was an American historian, minister, and biographer. A professor by occupation, Malone spent the majority of his career teaching at the University of Virginia , where he served as the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History.

#6427

George Clark

1890 - 1979 (89 years)

Sir George Norman Clark, was an English historian, academic and British Army officer. He was the Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford from 1931 to 1943 and the Regius Professor of Modern History at The University of Cambridge from 1943 to 1947. He served as Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, from 1947 to 1957.

#6428

George E. Mowry

1909 - 1984 (75 years)

George Edwin Mowry was an American historian focusing primarily on the Progressive Era. As a professor at UCLA and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he taught large classes and directed over 50 PhD dissertations. Mowry published five books, co-authored six others and edited three books. He published 10 book chapters, over 50 encyclopedia articles and over 100 book reviews in magazines and professional journals. He joined John Donald Hicks as coauthor of a highly successful university textbook. He was active in many organizations, especially the Organization of American Historians.

#6429

Henry Guerlac

1910 - 1985 (75 years)

Henry Edward Guerlac was an American historian of science. He taught at Cornell University where he was the Goldwin Smith Professor of History and a member of the Department of History. Biography Guerlac earned his PhD in European history from Harvard in 1941.

#6430

Paul Herman Buck

Paul Herman Buck

1899 - 1978 (79 years)

Paul Herman Buck was an American historian. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1938 and became the first Provost of Harvard University in 1945. Biography Buck was born in Ohio. He received a Bachelor's degree and an MA from Ohio State University. While an undergraduate, Buck was initiated into the Kappa Sigma fraternity. In 1922 he published his first book Evolution of the National Parks System. He went to Harvard University for his graduate studies, and received a Master's degree in 1924. After studying for one year in Britain and France under a Sheldon traveling fellowship, he joined Harvard as an instructor in history in 1926.

#6431

Marcus Cunliffe

1922 - 1990 (68 years)

Marcus Falkner Cunliffe was a British scholar who specialized in cultural and military American Studies. He was particularly interested in comparing how Europeans viewed Americans and how Americans viewed Europeans.

#6432

Câmara Cascudo

1898 - 1986 (88 years)

Luís da Câmara Cascudo was a Brazilian anthropologist, folklorist, journalist, historian, lawyer, and lexicographer. He was born in Natal, Northeast Brazil. He lived his entire life in Natal and dedicated himself to the study of Brazilian culture and he was a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. He was also interested in music and was a co-founder of the Natal Instituto de Música in 1933. The institute of anthropology there now bears his name.

#6433

E. Merton Coulter

1890 - 1981 (91 years)

Ellis Merton Coulter was an American historian of the South, author, and a founding member of the Southern Historical Association. For four decades, he was a professor at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, where he was chair of the History Department for 18 years. He was editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly for 50 years, and published 26 books on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

#6434

George MacKinnon Wrong

George MacKinnon Wrong

1860 - 1948 (88 years)

George MacKinnon Wrong was a Canadian clergyman and historian. Life and career Born at Grovesend in Elgin County, Canada West , he was ordained in the Anglican priesthood in 1883 after attending Wycliffe College. In 1894, as successor to Sir Daniel Wilson, he was appointed professor and head of the Department of History at the University of Toronto from which he retired in 1927. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1908 and received an honorary LLD from McGill University in 1919 and the University of Toronto in 1941. Wrong died in Toronto, Ontario on June 29, 1948.

#6435

Abraham Nasatir

1905 - 1981 (76 years)

Abraham Phineas Nasatir was an American educator and historian who specialized in early California and the Mississippi Valley areas. Nasatir was born in Santa Ana, California, to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Lithuania. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley when he was 19. He largely studied under Herbert Eugene Bolton at UC Berkeley.

#6436

Serge Aleksandrovich Zenkovsky

1907 - 1990 (83 years)

Serge Aleksandrovich Zenkovsky was a Russian historian, expatriate in the United States since 1949. He specialized in Economic, Eastern European and Central Asian history. Life Europe Zenkovsky was born on 16 June 1907 in Kiev. His father Aleksandr was a professor of economics, his mother Elena the daughter of a physician and professor of surgery; he also had a sister, Nadezhda. After the Russian Revolution, the family fled first to Constantinople, then Berlin and Prague, where Zenkovsky graduated in economic history. He then left his family in Prague to move to Paris, where his uncle Vasilii Vasilievich Zenkovsky lived.

#6437

Robert Seton-Watson

Robert Seton-Watson

1879 - 1951 (72 years)

Robert William Seton-Watson , commonly referred to as R. W. Seton-Watson and also known by the pseudonym Scotus Viator, was a British political activist and historian who played an active role in encouraging the breakup of Austria-Hungary and the emergence of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia during and after the First World War.

#6438

Laurence M. Larson

1868 - 1938 (70 years)

Laurence Marcellus Larson was a Norwegian born, American educator, historian, writer and translator. His notable works included his translation from Old Norse of Konungs skuggsjá. Biography Laurence Larson was born at Bergen in Hordaland, Norway. He was the son of Christian Spjutoy Larson and Ellen Mathilde Larson . He emigrated to the United States with his family in May 1870. He studied at Drake University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Larson was appointed to the UW faculty as a Scandinavian languages and history professor on April 17, 1906, but resigned later that year, on June 27.

#6439

Dixon Ryan Fox

1887 - 1945 (58 years)

Dixon Ryan Fox was an American educator, researcher, and president of Union College, New York from 1934 until his death in 1945. Fox graduated from Columbia College in 1911. He took his Ph.D in history at Columbia University where he was influenced by James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard and Herbert L. Osgood. He married Osgood's daughter and taught at Columbia from 1912 to the mid-1930s.

#6440

Hector Menteith Robertson

1905 - 1984 (79 years)

Hector Menteith Robertson was an economic historian who held the positions of Jagger Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town and president of the Economic Society of South Africa . He was also an editor and frequent contributor to the South African Journal of Economics.

#6441

John E. Stambaugh

1939 - 1990 (51 years)

John Evan Stambaugh was an American classical scholar and professor at Williams College. Stambaugh was educated at Trinity College and then at Princeton University, earning a Ph.D. in 1967. Stambaugh taught at Williams from 1965 until 1990 and was a specialist in the field of Greco-Roman religion as well as early Christianity. In addition to teaching at Williams, Stambaugh was a fellow of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. and a faculty and managing committee member and chair of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, Italy.

#6442

Marcus Jernegan

1872 - 1949 (77 years)

Marcus Wilson Jernegan was an American historian and a professor at the University of Chicago. In 2017, a scholar from Harvard referred to him as one of the leading historians of his time who influenced textbooks of his era and noted the tainted and bigoted sources he relied on.

#6443

Helen Cam

1885 - 1968 (83 years)

Helen Maud Cam, was an English historian of the Middle Ages, and the first woman to be appointed a tenured professor at Harvard University. Life and career Cam was born at Abingdon, Berkshire . Educated at home by her father William Herbert Cam, the headmaster of Abingdon School, she did her undergraduate degree at Royal Holloway College gaining a First in History there, and later an MA in Anglo-Saxon and Frankish studies at the University of London, after a fellowship year at Bryn Mawr College This degree led to her first book, Local Government in Francia and England, 768–1034 .

#6444

Christopher Dawson

1889 - 1970 (81 years)

Christopher Henry Dawson was an English Catholic historian, independent scholar, who wrote many books on cultural history and emphasized the necessity for Western culture to be in continuity with Christianity not to stagnate and deteriorate. Dawson has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century" and was recognized as being able to expound his thought to "Catholic and Protestant, Christian and non-Christian."

#6445

Garrett Mattingly

1900 - 1962 (62 years)

Garrett Mattingly was a professor of European history at Columbia University who specialized in early modern diplomatic history. In 1960 he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Defeat of the Spanish Armada.

#6446

W. L. Morton

1908 - 1980 (72 years)

William Lewis Morton was a Canadian historian who specialized in the development of the Canadian west. Along with Arthur R. M. Lower and Donald Creighton he is regarded as one of the dominant Canadian historians of his generation.

#6447

Fawn M. Brodie

1915 - 1981 (66 years)

Fawn McKay Brodie was an American biographer and one of the first female professors of history at UCLA, who is best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History , a work of psychobiography, and No Man Knows My History , an early biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.

#6448

Wayland Hand

1907 - 1986 (79 years)

Wayland Debs Hand was an American folklorist. Biography Hand was born in New Zealand, where his parents had emigrated. A few years after his birth, the family returned to Utah, where Hand grew up. He attended the University of Utah, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees in German in 1933 and 1934. He then earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1936, writing his dissertation on German folk songs.

#6449

Hajo Holborn

1902 - 1969 (67 years)

Hajo Holborn was a German-American historian and specialist in modern German history. Early life Hajo Holborn was born the son of Ludwig Holborn, the German physicist and "Direktor der Physikalisch-Technischen Reichsanstalt," and became a student of Friedrich Meinecke at Berlin University, where he achieved a doctor of philosophy in 1924. After establishing at Heidelberg in 1926 as lecturer in medieval and modern history, he became Privatdozent there until he was called back to Berlin as Carnegie Professor of History and International Relationships at the private Deutsche Hochschule für Politik.

#6450

Frederick John Teggart

1870 - 1946 (76 years)

Frederick John Teggart was an Irish-American historian and social scientist, known for work on the history of civilizations. Life He was born in Belfast on 9 May 1870, and was educated at Methodist College Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin. He emigrated to the United States and graduated B.A. at Stanford University in 1894. He then worked as a librarian, first at Stanford and then at the Mechanics-Mercantile Library in San Francisco.

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