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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in History,
#6551
Michael Postan
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Sir Michael Moissey Postan FBA was a British historian. He was known informally as Munia Postan. Biography Postan was born to a Jewish family in Bendery, in the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire, and studied at the St Vladimir University in Kyiv, leaving Russia in 1919 after the October Revolution and settling in the UK. He held positions at University College London and at the London School of Economics, before being appointed Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge, from 1937. He was known as an economic historian of medieval Europe. Eric Hobsbawm notes he wa...
Go to Profile#6552
Owen Lattimore
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Owen Lattimore was an American Orientalist and writer. He was an influential scholar of China and Central Asia, especially Mongolia. Although he never earned a college degree, in the 1930s he was editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1938 to 1963. He was director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations there from 1939 to 1953. During World War II, he was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate on American policy in Asia.
Go to Profile#6553
Richard Hofstadter
1916 - 1970 (54 years)
Richard Hofstadter was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historical materialist approach to history, in the 1950s he came closer to the concept of "consensus history", and was epitomized by some of his admirers as the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus." Others see in his work an early critique of the one-dimensional society, as Hofstadter was equally critical of socialist and capitalist models of society, and bemoaned the "consensus" w...
Go to Profile#6554
Daniel Waugh
Daniel C. Waugh is a historian based at the University of Washington. He did his undergraduate work at Yale University, and in 1963 graduated with a B.A. in Physics. In 1965, he finished his Master's on the Regional Studies of the Soviet Union at Harvard University, and seven years later he completed his Ph.D. at the same institution. The same year, 1972, he began his employment at the University of Washington, and has remained there ever since. He taught in three different departments, namely the departments of History, International Studies, and Slavic and East European Languages and Literature until 2006.
Go to Profile#6555
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy
1873 - 1962 (89 years)
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was an American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the discipline known as the history of ideas with his book The Great Chain of Being , on the topic of that name, which is regarded as 'probably the single most influential work in the history of ideas in the United States during the last half century'. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1932. In 1940, he founded the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Go to Profile#6556
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".
Go to Profile#6557
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.
Go to Profile#6558
Ralph Henry Gabriel
1890 - 1987 (97 years)
Ralph Henry Gabriel was an American historian. He held the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and was the founding father of the American Studies Association. Early life and education Gabriel was born on April 29, 1890, in Reading, New York, to parents Cleveland and Alta Monroe Gabriel. He earned his Bachelor of Arts, Masters of Arts and Ph.D. at Yale University before serving in the U.S. Army Infantry during World War I.
Go to Profile#6559
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 .
Go to Profile#6560
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.
Go to Profile#6561
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.
Go to Profile#6562
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.
Go to Profile#6563
Arthur N. Holcombe
1884 - 1977 (93 years)
Arthur Norman Holcombe was an American political scientist and educator who taught at Harvard University from 1910 until his retirement in 1955. He was known for his studies of government structure.
Go to Profile#6564
Richard B. Morris
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Richard Brandon Morris was an American historian best known for his pioneering work in colonial American legal history and the early history of American labor. In later years, he shifted his research interests to the constitutional, diplomatic, and political history of the American Revolution and the making of the United States Constitution.
Go to Profile#6565
George Wynn Brereton Huntingford
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
George Wynn Brereton Huntingford was an English linguist, anthropologist and historian. He lectured in East African languages and cultures at SOAS, University of London from 1950 until 1966. In 1966, Huntingford went to Canada to organise the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Brunswick at Fredericton, and retired to Málaga the next year, where he lived after his retirement.
Go to Profile#6566
Frank Stenton
1880 - 1967 (87 years)
Sir Frank Merry Stenton FBA was an English historian of Anglo-Saxon England, a professor of history at the University of Reading , president of the Royal Historical Society , Reading University's vice-chancellor .
Go to Profile#6567
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.
Go to Profile#6568
Joseph Ward Swain
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
#6569
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.
Go to Profile#6570
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.
Go to Profile#6571
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.
Go to Profile#6572
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.
Go to Profile#6573
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.
Go to Profile#6574
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.
Go to Profile#6575
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.
Go to Profile#6576
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.
Go to Profile#6577
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.
Go to Profile#6578
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.
Go to Profile#6579
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.
Go to Profile#6580
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.
Go to Profile#6581
Leonard Schapiro
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Leonard Bertram Naman Schapiro was the leading British scholar of the origins and development of the Soviet political system. He taught for many years at the London School of Economics, where he was Professor of Political Science with Special Reference to Russian Studies. Schapiro was best known for his magisterial study, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, though his early work on the rise to power of the Bolshevik Party, The Origins of the Communist Autocracy, was his most intellectually ambitious and innovative contribution to the field of Soviet studies. Because of his prominence i...
Go to Profile#6582
Fritz Heichelheim
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Fritz Moritz Heichelheim was a German-born ancient historian, who specialized in ancient economic history, at the University of Gießen and as Professor of Greek and Roman History at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#6583
Selig Perlman
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Selig Perlman was an economist and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Background Perlman was born in Białystok in Congress Poland in 1888. His father, Mordecai, was a Jewish merchant who supplied yarn and thread to home weavers and was a friend of Maxim Litvinov's father.
Go to Profile#6584
J. M. Wallace-Hadrill
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, was a British academic and one of the foremost historians of the early Merovingian period. Life and career Wallace-Hadrill was born on 29 September 1916 in Bromsgrove, where his father was a master at Bromsgrove School. He was Professor of Mediaeval History at the University of Manchester between 1955 and 1961. He then became a Senior Research Fellow of Merton College in the University of Oxford from 1961 till 1974. He was Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1974 to 1983 and, between 1974 and 1985, a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#6585
Gerald S. Graham
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Gerald Sandford Graham was Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London from 1949 until his retirement in 1970. He earned a world reputation for his series of in-depth studies of the interrelationship between sea power and the development of the British empire.
Go to Profile#6586
Leonard Woods Labaree
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Leonard W. Labaree was a distinguished documentary editor, a professor of history at Yale University for more than forty years, a historian of Colonial America, and the founding editor of the multivolume publication of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin.
Go to Profile#6587
Alfred Whitney Griswold
1906 - 1963 (57 years)
Alfred Whitney Griswold was an American historian and educator. He served as 16th president of Yale University from 1951 to 1963, during which he built much of Yale's modern scientific research infrastructure, especially on Science Hill.
Go to Profile#6588
Thomas Perkins Abernethy
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Thomas Perkins Abernethy was an American historian and academic. He served as a professor of early American history at a number of universities throughout the South and Southwest United States. He mainly taught early American colonial history that concentrated on southern states, their notable figures, frontier life, the move westward, and how it impacted the social, economic and political fabric of colonial America and its transition into an independent nation.
Go to Profile#6589
Harry Carman
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
Harry Carman was an American historian. Having attended Syracuse University followed by studies at Columbia, he became a professor at the latter, and served from 1943 to 1950 he served as its dean. During his tenure as Dean, Carman was a strong supporter of the college within the university, particularly of its Core Curriculum. One of his most notable students was Jacques Barzun. Noted Historian and famous author of Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Reinhard H. Luthin, Fulbright Scholar and Columbia Professor, collaborated with Dean Carman to create "Lincoln and the Patronage".
Go to Profile#6590
Arthur Llewellyn Basham
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
Arthur Llewellyn Basham was a noted historian, Indologist and author of a number of books. As a Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London in the 1950s and the 1960s, he taught a number of famous historians of India, including professors Ram Sharan Sharma, Romila Thapar, and V. S. Pathak and Thomas R. Trautmann and David Lorenzen.
Go to Profile#6591
James C. Malin
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
James Claude Malin was an American historian and professor of history who taught at the University of Kansas and was involved with the Kansas Historical Society, including as its president. Bibliography The United States after the World War, New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1972John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-SixEssays on HistoriographyThe Nebraska Question, 1852-1854Confounded Rot about Napoleon : Reflections Upon Science and Technology, nationalism, World Depression of the Eighteen-Nineties, and AfterwardsThe Grassland of North America : prolegomena to its History, 1947Winter Wheat i...
Go to Profile#6592
David Diringer
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
David Diringer was a British linguist, palaeographer and writer. He was the author of several well-known books about writing systems. Biography Diringer was born to Jacob Munzer and Mirl Diringer on 16 June 1900, in Tlumacz – at that time considered part of Austria, later Poland, but now Tlumach, Ukraine. He stayed in Tlumacz through high school but moved to Italy to earn, in 1927, his Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Florence. This was followed, in 1929, by a diploma in ancient history. He was appointed a professor at Florence , his first academic interest being the culture of the Etruscans.
Go to Profile#6593
Richard Pares
1902 - 1958 (56 years)
Richard Pares was a British historian. He "was considered to be among the outstanding British historians of his time." Family life and education The eldest son of the five children of the historian Bernard Pares and his wife Margaret Ellis, Richard Pares won scholarships at Winchester College and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first-class degree in literae humaniores in 1924. On obtaining his Oxford degree, he was elected to a fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford, which he retained until 1945. In 1937, he married Janet Lindsay Powicke, daughter of the historian F. Maurice P...
Go to Profile#6594
Benjamin A. Botkin
1901 - 1975 (74 years)
Benjamin Albert Botkin was an American folklorist and scholar. Early life Botkin was born on February 7, 1901, in East Boston, Massachusetts, to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. He attended the English High School of Boston and then studied at Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1920 with a B.A. in English. He earned his M.A. in English at Columbia University a year later in 1921, and his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1931, where he studied under Louise Pound and William Duncan Strong.
Go to Profile#6595
Dixon Wecter
1906 - 1950 (44 years)
Dixon Wecter was an American historian. He was "the first professor of American History" at the University of Sydney, and the Margaret Byrne Professor of United States History at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the author of three books.
Go to Profile#6596
Charles C. Tansill
1890 - 1964 (74 years)
Charles Callan Tansill was an American historian and the author of fourteen history books. He was a professor of history at American University, Fordham University, and Georgetown University. An isolationist before World War II, he was accused of revisionism after the war.
Go to Profile#6597
Caroline F. Ware
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Caroline Farrar Ware was a professor of history and a New Deal activist. Her work focused on community development, consumer protection, industrial development, civil rights, and women's issues. Biography
Go to Profile#6598
Georges Florovsky
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Georges Vasilievich Florovsky was a Russian Orthodox priest, theologian, and historian. Born in the Russian Empire, he spent his working life in Paris and New York . With Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky, Justin Popović and Dumitru Stăniloae he was one of the more influential Eastern Orthodox Christian theologians of the mid-20th century. He was particularly concerned that modern Christian theology might receive inspiration from the lively intellectual debates of the patristic traditions of the undivided Church rather than from later Scholastic or Reformation categories of thought.
Go to Profile#6599
Eric G. Forbes
1933 - 1984 (51 years)
Eric Gray Forbes FRSE FRAS was Professor of the History of Science at the University of Edinburgh. Life He was born in St. Andrews in Fife on 30 March 1933. He went to Madras College in St Andrews University and graduated BSc. He then continued as a postgraduate at St Andrews and the University of London gaining a PhD in Astronomy.
Go to Profile#6600
William Cecil Dampier
1867 - 1952 (85 years)
Sir William Cecil Dampier FRS was a British scientist, agriculturist, and science historian who developed a method of extracting lactose from whey. He was born in London, the son of Charles Langley and Mary Whetham and the grandson of Sir Charles Whetham, a former Lord Mayor of London. In 1886, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge and in 1889 commenced his varied researches in the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1891 was elected a Fellow of Trinity.
Go to Profile