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,
#6501
Herbert Feis
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Herbert Feis was an American historian, author, and economist who was the Advisor on International Economic Affairs in the US Department of State during the Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt administrations.
Go to Profile#6502
Marc Bloch
1886 - 1944 (58 years)
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg , the University of Paris , and the University of Montpellier .
Go to Profile#6503
William Bascom
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
William R. Bascom was an award-winning American folklorist, anthropologist, and museum director. He was a specialist in the art and culture of West Africa and the African Diaspora, especially the Yoruba of Nigeria.
Go to Profile#6504
Allan Nevins
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Joseph Allan Nevins was an American historian and journalist, known for his extensive work on the history of the Civil War and his biographies of such figures as Grover Cleveland, Hamilton Fish, Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller, as well as his public service. He was a leading exponent of business history and oral history.
Go to Profile#6505
Arthur H. Cole
1889 - 1974 (85 years)
Arthur Harrison Cole was an American economic historian and was the head of the Harvard University Business School's library. Cole created the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History that was addressed by Joseph Schumpeter, and that had as participants several graduate students who later went on to distinguished careers in economic history.
Go to Profile#6506
Merle Curti
1897 - 1996 (99 years)
Merle Eugene Curti was an American progressive historian who influenced peace studies, intellectual history and social history, including by using cliometrics . At Columbia University and for decades at the University of Wisconsin, Curti directed 86 finished Ph.D. dissertations and had a wide range of correspondents. He was known for his commitment to democracy, as well as the Turnerian thesis that social and economic forces shape American life, thought and character.
Go to Profile#6507
Roland Bainton
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Roland Herbert Bainton was a British-born American Protestant church historian. Life Bainton was born in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, England, and came to the United States in 1902. He received an AB degree from Whitman College, and BD and PhD. degrees from Yale University. He also received a number of honorary degrees including a DD from Meadville Theological Seminary and from Oberlin College, Dr. Theologiae from the University of Marburg, Germany, and LittD from Gettysburg College. A specialist in Reformation history, Bainton was for 42 years Titus Street Professor of ecclesiastical history at Yal...
Go to Profile#6508
Carl Benjamin Boyer
1906 - 1976 (70 years)
Carl Benjamin Boyer was an American historian of sciences, and especially mathematics. Novelist David Foster Wallace called him the "Gibbon of math history". It has been written that he was one of few historians of mathematics of his time to "keep open links with contemporary history of science."
Go to Profile#6509
Lily Ross Taylor
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Lily Ross Taylor was an American academic and author, who in 1917 became the first female Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Biography Born in Auburn, Alabama, Lily Ross Taylor developed an interest in Roman studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning an A.B. in 1906. She went to Bryn Mawr College as a graduate student that year, and received her Ph.D. in Latin in 1912. Her dissertation advisor was Tenney Frank. From 1912 until 1927, she taught at Vassar, and, in 1917, she became the fourth female Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
Go to Profile#6510
Lynn Townsend White Jr.
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Lynn Townsend White Jr. was an American historian. He was a professor of medieval history at Princeton from 1933 to 1937, and at Stanford from 1937 to 1943. He was president of Mills College, Oakland, from 1943 to 1958 and a professor at University of California, Los Angeles from 1958 until 1987. Lynn White helped to found the Society for the History of Technology and was president from 1960 to 1962. He won the Pfizer Award for "Medieval Technology and Social Change" from the History of Science Society and the Leonardo da Vinci medal and Dexter prize from SHOT in 1964 and 1970. He was president of the History of Science Society from 1971 to 1972.
Go to Profile#6511
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.
Go to Profile#6512
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.
Go to Profile#6513
Lynn Thorndike
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Lynn Thorndike was an American historian of medieval science and alchemy. He was the son of a clergyman, Edward R. Thorndike, and the younger brother of Ashley Horace Thorndike, an American educator and expert on William Shakespeare, and Edward Lee Thorndike, known for being the father of modern educational psychology.
Go to Profile#6514
Margot Finn
Margot C. Finn, is a British historian and academic, who specialises in Britain and the British colonial world during the long nineteenth century. She has been Professor of Modern British History at the University College, London since 2012. Finn was previously the President of the Royal Historical Society and a trustee of the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Go to Profile#6515
J. R. Partington
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
James Riddick Partington was a British chemist and historian of chemistry who published multiple books and articles in scientific magazines. His most famous works were An Advanced Treatise on Physical Chemistry and A History of Chemistry , for which he received the Dexter Award and the George Sarton Medal.
Go to Profile#6516
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".
Go to Profile#6517
Herbert Heaton
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Herbert Heaton was a British-born economic historian. He held posts at the University of Tasmania, Queen's University, Kingston, and the University of Minnesota, where he was head of the Department of History from 1954 until his retirement in 1958. Heaton was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1945.
Go to Profile#6518
James T. Shotwell
1874 - 1965 (91 years)
James Thomson Shotwell was a Canadian-born American history professor. He played an instrumental role in the creation of the International Labour Organization in 1919, as well as for his influence in promoting inclusion of a declaration of human rights in the UN Charter.
Go to Profile#6519
Salo Wittmayer Baron
1895 - 1989 (94 years)
Salo Wittmayer Baron was an Austrian-born American historian, described as "the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century". Baron taught at Columbia University from 1930 until his retirement in 1963.
Go to Profile#6520
Michael Rostovtzeff
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff, or Rostovtsev , was a Russian historian whose career straddled the 19th and 20th centuries and who produced important works on ancient Roman and Greek history. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#6521
Joseph Strayer
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Joseph Reese Strayer was an American medievalist. He was a student of Charles Homer Haskins. Life Strayer graduated from Princeton University and Harvard University . Strayer taught at Princeton University for many decades, starting in the 1930s. He was chair of the history department and president of the American Historical Association in 1971. Strayer has been credited with training a large percentage of the American medievalist profession with liberal fashion; many of his students are still teaching and active. Notable students include Teofilo Ruiz, William Chester Jordan, and Richard W.
Go to Profile#6522
Avery Craven
1885 - 1980 (95 years)
Avery Odelle Craven was an American historian who wrote extensively about the nineteenth-century United States, the American Civil War and Congressional Reconstruction from a then-revisionist viewpoint sympathetic to the Lost Cause as well as democratic failings during his own lifetime.
Go to Profile#6523
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.
Go to Profile#6524
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.
Go to Profile#6525
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' .
Go to Profile#6526
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.
Go to Profile#6527
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.
Go to Profile#6528
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.
Go to Profile#6529
Samuel Flagg Bemis
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Samuel Flagg Bemis was an American historian and biographer. For many years he taught at Yale University. He was also president of the American Historical Association and a specialist in American diplomatic history. He was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes. Jerald A. Combs says he was "the greatest of all historians of early American diplomacy."
Go to Profile#6530
George Rogers Taylor
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
George Rogers Taylor was an American economic historian, best known for his 1951 work The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. Biography Taylor was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. He was the son of Webb Vine Taylor and Grace Rogers. He received his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago. He graduated in 1914 from Wayland Academy at Beaver Dam and from what was then Oshkosh Normal School in 1916. He earned his way through college by waiting on tables, mowing lawns and tending furnaces. After his graduation from Oshkosh Normal School, he served a year as principal of a small elementary school at Waukesha and then enlisted for two years in the U.S.
Go to Profile#6531
Arthur R. M. Lower
1889 - 1988 (99 years)
Arthur Reginald Marsden Lower was a Canadian historian and "liberal nationalist" interested in Canadian economic history, particularly the forest trade, and in Canada–US relations. He was the most nationalistic of Canadian historians, and highly distrustful of immigrants, Americans and any others outside of what he considered to be the Canadian family. The staple theory of Harold Innis influenced his research, much of which focused on the Canadian lumber industry. He was also strongly influenced by the ideas of American historian Frederick Jackson Turner regarding the influence of the frontier – The West – on distinctly American characteristics.
Go to Profile#6532
Elizabeth Wiskemann
1899 - 1971 (72 years)
Elizabeth Meta Wiskemann was an English journalist and historian of Anglo-German ancestry. She was an intelligence officer in World War II, and the Montagu Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#6533
Margery Perham
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Dame Margery Freda Perham was a British historian of, and writer on, African affairs. She was known especially for the intellectual force of her arguments in favour of British decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s.
Go to Profile#6534
Horace Mann Bond
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Horace Mann Bond was an American historian, college administrator, social science researcher and the father of civil-rights leader Julian Bond. He earned graduate and doctoral degrees from University of Chicago at a time when only a small percentage of any young adults attended any college. He was an influential leader at several historically black colleges and was appointed the first president of Fort Valley State University in Georgia in 1939, where he managed its growth in programs and revenue. In 1945, he became the first African-American president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#6535
Walter Prescott Webb
1888 - 1963 (75 years)
Walter Prescott Webb was an American historian noted for his groundbreaking work on the American West. As president of the Texas State Historical Association, he launched the project that produced the Handbook of Texas. He is a member of the Hall of Great Westerners, which is a part of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
Go to Profile#6536
John Shelton Curtiss
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
John Shelton Curtiss , was an American historian of Russia and historical scholar of old Yankee stock. Curtiss was a longtime professor of history at Duke University. Early life and education John Shelton Curtiss was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of prominent attorney, Harlow Clarke Curtiss and his socialite wife, Ethel Curtiss. His maternal grandfather was Dr. Matthew D. Mann.
Go to Profile#6537
William B. Hesseltine
1902 - 1963 (61 years)
William Best Hesseltine was an American historian and politician. As a historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for nearly three decades, Hesseltine's field of expertise was mid-19th century American history, especially the Civil War, Reconstruction Era and American South. He also became known as the mentor of a generation of American historians, many of whom also won prizes for their writing.
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Roberto Weiss
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Roberto Weiss was an Italian-British scholar and historian who specialised in the fields of Italian-English cultural contacts during the period of the Renaissance, and of Renaissance humanism. Early career Weiss was born in Milan, Italy. After spending his later childhood in Rome, he came to Britain to study law at Oxford University. He worked for a short time from 1932 to 1933 in the Department of Western Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, and obtained his D.Phil from Oxford in 1934, in the same year winning the Charles Oldham prize. He was naturalised British in 1934. The author John Buchan became his friend and mentor.
Go to Profile#6539
Eleanora Carus-Wilson
1897 - 1977 (80 years)
Eleanora Mary Carus-Wilson, FBA was a British economic historian. Known for her work on rural Medieval textile industries in England, she made significant contributions to the understanding of that technology in the region.
Go to Profile#6540
Anthony Blunt
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Anthony Frederick Blunt , styled Sir Anthony Blunt KCVO from 1956 to November 1979, was a leading British art historian and Soviet spy. Blunt was a professor of art history at the University of London, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. His 1967 monograph on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin is still widely regarded as a watershed book in art history. His teaching text and reference work Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, first published in 1953, reached its fifth edition in 1999, at which time it was still considered the best ...
Go to Profile#6541
W. N. Medlicott
1900 - 1987 (87 years)
William Norton Medlicott was a British historian. He was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham College, University College London and the Institute of Historical Research. In 1926 Medlicott took up a post at University College, Swansea and in 1936 he married Dorothy Kathleen Coveney. Medlicott worked at the Board of Trade for the first year of the Second World War before being selected by Sir Keith Hancock to be a member of the Cabinet Office Historical Section. Medlicott published the results of his research in his two-volume work The Economic Blockade.
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Friedrich Lütge
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Friedrich Lütge was a German economist, social historian and economic historian. He taught at the Leipzig Graduate School of Management and at the University of Leipzig between 1940 and 1947, then moving on to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where he taught till a few months before he died. Through his research work between 1949 and 1968 he exercised a great influence on the understanding of economic history in West Germany. Together with Wilhelm Abel and Günther Franz he contributed decisively to research into agrarian history in Germany. He was instrumental in ensuring that soci...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Go to Profile#6548
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.
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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.
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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.
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