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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,

#6601

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.

#6602

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.

#6603

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.

#6604

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.

#6605

Alfred Whitney Griswold

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.

#6606

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.

#6607

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".

#6608

Arthur Llewellyn Basham

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.

#6609

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...

#6610

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.

#6611

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...

#6612

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.

#6613

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.

#6614

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.

#6615

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

#6616

Georges Florovsky

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.

#6617

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.

#6618

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.

#6619

Robert C. Binkley

1897 - 1940 (43 years)

Robert Cedric Binkley was an American historian. As chair of the Joint Committee on Materials for Research of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies in the 1930s he led several projects in the areas of publication using new near-print technologies, microphotography, copyright and archival management, many under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. His theoretical writings on amateur scholarship and the ways non-experts could contribute to scholarship have been influential on recent thinking about digital humanities and web publishing.

#6620

Raymond James Sontag

1897 - 1972 (75 years)

Raymond James Sontag was an American historian of European diplomacy of the 19th and 20th centuries. Life He was born on October 2, 1897. He received his B.S. and M.A. degrees from the University of Illinois in 1920 and 1921, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1924.

#6621

D. P. Walker

1914 - 1985 (71 years)

Daniel Pickering Walker was an English historian and author of several noted studies on the occult in Western history. Life Walker was trained at Oxford. He spent much of his career at the Warburg Institute at the University of London. He was made senior research fellow in 1953, and held the Warburg's Chair in the History of the Classical Tradition from 1975 until his retirement in 1981.

#6622

Julia de Lacy Mann

1891 - 1985 (94 years)

Julia de Lacy Mann was an English economic historian. She was principal of St Hilda's College, Oxford, for 27 years, from 1928 to 1955. Early life and education Julia de Lacy Mann was born in London on 22 August 1891, the daughter of James Saumarez Mann, a classical scholar, and Amy Bowman Mann, the daughter of a classical scholar. Julia's only sibling, James Saumarez Mann, was killed by a sniper in Iraq in 1920.

#6623

Vincent Desborough

1914 - 1978 (64 years)

Vincent Robin d'Arba Desborough, FBA, FSA was an English historian and archaeologist. His is credited with discovering the Greek Dark Ages. Life and career Born on 19 July 1914 at Tunbridge Wells, Desborough's father was Latvian and his mother British. He was schooled in France and Switzerland before attending St Augustine's in Ramsgate and Downside School. He then studied classics at New College, Oxford, from 1932, graduating in the second class in 1936. He completed the BLitt at Oxford under Sir John Myres's supervision. In 1937, he was awarded the Macmillan Studentship by the British Schoo...

#6624

Keith Hancock

1898 - 1988 (90 years)

Sir William Keith Hancock, , also known as W. K. Hancock, was a prominent Australian historian and academic. Hancock was an Anglican and keen admirer of the British Empire. Early life and education He was born in Melbourne, Colony of Victoria, the son of Archdeacon William Hancock. At the age of nine, he won the Royal Humane Society's medal for rescuing another child from drowning in the Mitchell River. He was educated at Melbourne Grammar School and later the University of Melbourne where he was resident at Trinity College from 1917, winning the Perry Scholarship, Trinity's most prestigious award.

#6625

Arthur McCandless Wilson

1902 - 1979 (77 years)

Arthur McCandless Wilson was a professor of biography and government. He is known primarily for his two-volume biography of Diderot. Wilson graduated in 1922 with A.B. from South Dakota's Yankton College. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1926 with B.A., in 1927 with B. Litt., and in 1931 with M.A. . He married Julia Mary Tolford in 1927. At Harvard University he graduated with M.A. in 1930 and Ph.D. in 1933. In Dartmouth College's department of biography, he was appointed in 1933 instructor, in 1936 assistant professor, and in 1940 full professor, retiring in 1967 as professor emeritus.

#6626

Ralph Pugh

1910 - 1982 (72 years)

Ralph Bernard Pugh was an historian and editor of the Victoria History of the Counties of England from 1949 to 1977. He was also a professor of English history at the University of London, a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, a teacher of palaeography, and an expert on medieval penology.

#6627

Mary Flug Handlin

1913 - 1976 (63 years)

Mary Flug Handlin was an American historian who was the editor of the Harvard University Center for the Study of the History of Liberty in America from 1958 to 1976. She co-authored six books on U.S. politics and society with her husband, Oscar Handlin.

#6628

Marion Thompson Wright

1904 - 1962 (58 years)

Marion Thompson Wright was an African-American scholar and activist. In 1940, Wright became the first African-American woman in the United States to earn her Ph.D. in history. Early life Marion Manola Thompson Wright was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on September 12, 1902, to Minnie Thompson and Moses R. Thompson. Wright was the youngest of four children, and had two older twin sisters and a brother who died at a young age.

#6629

David Harris Willson

1901 - 1973 (72 years)

David Harris Willson was an American historian and professor who specialized in the history of 17th-century England. Early life and education Willson's progenitors bearing the Willson name first arrived from England in 1638, settling in Dedham, Massachusetts. Another English progenitor, John Harris, Sr., founded Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. David Harris Willson's parents were Thomas Harris Willson and Amelia Shryrock Willson. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

#6630

Reinhard H. Luthin

Reinhard H. Luthin

1905 - 1962 (57 years)

Reinhard Henry Luthin was a historian best known for his contribution to the study of President Abraham Lincoln. He was a professor of history at Columbia University, with a lifelong interest in facts regarding Lincoln's life and times.

#6631

William B. Willcox

1907 - 1985 (78 years)

William Bradford Willcox was an American historian. He was born in Ithaca, New York. He died in North Haven, Connecticut. Education: He received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1928 and studied at Cambridge University. At Yale University he studied architecture , and Tudor-Stuart English history . Wallace Notestein directed his dissertation, which was recognized as a pioneer study of government in Gloucestershire. The work received the distinguished John Addison Porter Prize for best work of scholarship in a given year.

#6632

Koppel Pinson

1904 - 1961 (57 years)

Koppel Shub Pinson was a historian who specialized in the origins of German nationalism. Early life Born in Postawy, Russian Empire , on February 11, 1904, Pinson immigrated to the United States with his family in 1907.

#6633

Warren Ault

1887 - 1989 (102 years)

Warren Ortman Ault was an American historian, who taught at Boston University from 1913 to 1957. Life Ault graduated from Baker University in 1907, before studying at Jesus College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. While a student at Baker, he was a member of the local Zeta Chi fraternity. He then obtained a doctorate from Yale University in 1919, having served as a second lieutenant in the artillery in the First World War. He taught history at Boston University from 1913 to 1957, becoming William Edwards Huntington professor. He became an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford in 1971. He wa...

#6634

Jaume Vicens i Vives

Jaume Vicens i Vives

1910 - 1960 (50 years)

Jaume Vicens Vives was a Spanish historian, and is considered one of the top influential Catalan historians of the 20th century. Biography Childhood He was the son of Juan Vicens Comas and Victoria Vives and was born on the Santa Eugenia road, number 5, in Girona. His father had arrived in Girona at the end of the 19th century and worked as a proxy in the factory La Farinera Ensesa. His mother had a dressmaker's shop in the Plaça del Gra. His parents had two sons and a daughter: Juan, born in 1906; Jaime, in 1910 and María del Carmen in 1923.

#6635

Edwin Lieuwen

1923 - 1988 (65 years)

Edwin Lieuwen was an American historian, professor, and author. His area of expertise was focused on Latin America. His work was a major precursor to the establishing of the Latin American Institute.

#6636

Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer

1864 - 1936 (72 years)

Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer was a Swiss folklorist, Germanist and medievalist, from 1900 professor for phonetics, Swiss dialectology and folklore at the University of Basle and founder of the Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde in 1896. His 1902 essay Die Volkskunde als Wissenschaft received international attention.

#6637

Goronwy Edwards

1891 - 1976 (85 years)

Sir John Goronwy Edwards was a Welsh historian. Early life Edwards, who was proficient in Welsh before he could read English, was educated at Holywell Grammar School before matriculating at Jesus College, Oxford in 1909. His 1913 essay on Danby gained him proxime accessit in the Stanhope prize competition.

#6638

John Le Patourel

1909 - 1981 (72 years)

John Herbert Le Patourel was a British medieval historian and professor at the University of Leeds. Biography Le Patourel was born on 29 July 1909 in Guernsey, where his father, Herbert Augustus Le Patourel, was the procureur from 1929 to 1934. He was educated at Elizabeth College, Guernsey and Jesus College, Oxford where he obtained a BA in Modern History in 1931 followed by a DPhil. In 1939 he married Jean Bird , who became an expert in medieval ceramics and was a Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Leeds from 1967 to 1980. They had a daughter and three sons. His brother, Herbe...

#6639

Nora K. Chadwick

1891 - 1972 (81 years)

Nora Kershaw Chadwick CBE FSA FBA was an English philologist who specialized in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Old Norse studies. Early life and education Nora Kershaw was born in Lancashire in 1891, the first daughter of James Kershaw and Emma Clara Booth, married in 1888. Nora's sister Mabel, born in 1895, converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun.

#6640

LeRoy R. Hafen

1893 - 1985 (92 years)

LeRoy Reuben Hafen was a historian of the American West and a Latter-day Saint. For many years he was a professor of history at Brigham Young University . Biography He was born on December 8, 1893, in Bunkerville, Nevada to John George Hafen, a polygamist, and Mary Ann Stucki. He attended high school in Cedar City, Utah for two years and then at the St. George Stake Academy in St. George, Utah. It was in St. George that Hafen met his wife, Ann Woodbury. They were married on 3 September 1915 in the St. George Temple. He received his bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University. After this he taught school in Bunkerville and then was the principal of Virgin Valley High School.

#6641

Earl Lewis

1900 - Present (125 years)

Earl Lewis is the founding director of the Center for Social Solutions and professor of history at the University of Michigan. He was president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 2013 to 2018. Before his appointment as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Lewis served for over eight years as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and as the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and African American Studies at Emory University. He was the university's first African-American provost and at the time the highest-ranking African-American administrator in the...

#6642

Władysław Czapliński

1905 - 1981 (76 years)

Władysław Czapliński was a Polish historian, a professor of the University of Wrocław, author of many popular books about Polish history. He finished his studies at the Jagiellonian University in 1927 in the Second Polish Republic, and for the next several years he was a teacher of history. During the Second World War he took part in the underground education in Poland during World War II. After the war he moved to Wrocław, where he worked at the local university until his retirement in 1975.

#6643

Charles Farwell Edson Jr.

1905 - 1988 (83 years)

Charles Farwell Edson Jr. was an American scholar of Ancient History. Edson was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1905 as the son of poet and musician Charles Farwell Edson and social activist and feminist Katherine Philips Edson, and the great nephew of prominent Chicago businessman John V. Farwell and Senator Charles B. Farwell. Edson received the degree of A.B. in Classics from Stanford University in 1929 . He went on to earn his Ph.D. in History at Harvard University in 1939 with a dissertation entitled “Five Studies in Macedonian History" directed by Professor William Scott Ferguson . ...

#6644

Johannes Tropfke

Johannes Tropfke

1866 - 1939 (73 years)

Johannes Tropfke was a German mathematician and teacher, who is best remembered for his influential work on the history of mathematics Geschichte der Elementarmathematik, which consists of seven volumes.

#6645

Philip Wayne Powell

1913 - 1987 (74 years)

Philip Wayne Powell was an American historian specializing in the Spanish colonial history of the American Southwest. He was born in Chino, California, attended Occidental College and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his B.A. in 1936. He undertook graduate studies at Berkeley, taking Hispanic studies with Herbert I. Priestley and Herbert E. Bolton. Powell completed his Ph.D. in 1941, and joined the Army.

#6646

Alfons Dopsch

1868 - 1953 (85 years)

Alfons Dopsch was an Austrian social and economic historian who specialised in the history of medieval Europe. He studied at Institut fur Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung and was a professor at the University of Vienna from 1898 to 1936.

#6647

Hermann Strasburger

1909 - 1985 (76 years)

Hermann Strasburger was a German ancient historian. He was the son of the internist Julius Strasburger and grandson of the botanist Eduard Strasburger.

#6648

John F. Benton

1931 - 1988 (57 years)

John F. Benton was the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. Education He graduated from Haverford College, with a BA in 1953, from Princeton University with an MA in 1955, and PhD in 1959. He taught at Reed College and the University of Pennsylvania.

#6649

James Pounder Whitney

1857 - 1939 (82 years)

James Pounder Whitney was a British ecclesiastical historian. Educated at King James's Grammar School, Almondbury and Owens College, Manchester, he was a foundation scholar at King's College, Cambridge, gaining firsts in the mathematics and history triposes in 1881. A fellow of King's College, he was ordained an Anglican priest in 1895. After various clerical and teaching appointment, he was professor of ecclesiastical history at King's College London from 1908 to 1918. He was Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge from 1919 to 1939. He was joint editor of Th...

#6650

Hubert Jedin

1900 - 1980 (80 years)

Hubert Jedin was a Catholic Church historian from Germany, whose publications specialized on the history of ecumenical councils in general and the Council of Trent in particular, on which he published a 2400-page history over the years 1951–1975.

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