Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in History,

#6751

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.

#6752

Frank Underhill

1889 - 1971 (82 years)

Frank Hawkins Underhill, SM, FRSC was a Canadian journalist, essayist, historian, social critic, and political thinker. Biography Frank Underhill, born in Stouffville, Ontario, was educated at the University of Toronto and the University of Oxford in which he was a member of the Fabian Society. He was influenced by social and political critics such as George Bernard Shaw and Goldwin Smith. He taught history at the University of Saskatchewan from 1914 until 1927 with a long interruption during World War I during which he served as an officer in the Hertfordshire Regiment of the British Army on the Western Front.

#6753

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

#6754

Eric Thomas Stokes

1924 - 1981 (57 years)

Eric Thomas Stokes was a historian of South Asia, especially early-modern and colonial India, and of the British Empire. Stokes was the second holder of Smuts Professorship of the History of the British Commonwealth at the University of Cambridge.

#6755

Carlton J. H. Hayes

1882 - 1964 (82 years)

Carlton Joseph Huntley Hayes was an American historian, educator, diplomat, devout Catholic and academic. A student of European history, he was a leading and pioneering specialist on the study of nationalism. He was elected as president of the American Historical Association over the opposition of liberals and the more explicit Anti-Catholic bias that defined the academic community of his era. He served as United States Ambassador to Spain in World War II. Although he came under attack from the CIO and others on the left that rejected any dealings with Francoist Spain, Hayes succeeded in his...

#6756

William Appleman Williams

1921 - 1990 (69 years)

William Appleman Williams was one of the 20th century's most prominent revisionist historians of American diplomacy. He achieved the height of his influence while on the faculty of the department of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is considered to be the foremost member of the "Wisconsin School" of diplomatic history.

#6757

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.

#6758

David M. Potter

1910 - 1971 (61 years)

David Morris Potter was an American historian specializing in the study of the American Civil War, especially the Confederacy, and the American South in general. His best known book is The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, which was completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher and published posthumously in 1976.

#6759

Marcel Bataillon

1895 - 1977 (82 years)

Marcel Édouard Bataillon, was a French Hispanicist who specialized in the philosophy and spirituality of sixteenth-century Spain. Career He began his studies in 1913 at the École Normale Supérieure. This was followed by a term at l’École des Hautes Études Hispaniques in Madrid where he was a delegate to the "International Committee of Allied Propaganda". From 1916 to 1919 he was a lieutenant in the French artillery. He emerged from these experiences as a confirmed pacifist.

#6760

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.

#6761

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...

#6762

Carl Benjamin Boyer

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."

#6763

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.

#6764

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.

#6765

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.

#6766

Crane Brinton

1898 - 1968 (70 years)

Clarence Crane Brinton was an American historian of France, as well as a historian of ideas. His most famous work, The Anatomy of Revolution likened the dynamics of revolutionary movements to the progress of fever.

#6767

Julius W. Pratt

1888 - 1983 (95 years)

Julius William Pratt was a United States historian who specialized in foreign relations and imperialism. Noted for his studies of the origins of the War of 1812 and the war with Spain in 1898, he also wrote a two-volume biography of Cordell Hull. He was the historian who rediscovered John L. O'Sullivan and his role in originating the idea of Manifest Destiny.

#6768

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.

#6769

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.

#6770

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...

#6771

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.

#6772

Sherburne F. Cook

1896 - 1974 (78 years)

Sherburne Friend Cook was an American physiologist and demographist, who served as professor and chairman of the department of physiology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was notable as a pioneer in population studies of the native peoples of North America and Mesoamerica and in field methods and quantitative analysis in archaeology.

#6773

Albrecht Goetze

1897 - 1971 (74 years)

Albrecht Ernst Rudolf Goetze was a German-American Hittitologist. Goetze was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1897. His father, Rudolf Goetze, was a psychiatrist. He began studies in Munich in 1915, but left to fight in World War I. Returning in 1918, he received his degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1922 and taught there for five years.

#6774

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.

#6775

Kenneth Scott Latourette

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.

#6776

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.

#6777

Erwin Ackerknecht

Erwin Ackerknecht

1906 - 1988 (82 years)

Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht was an active and influential Trotskyist in the 1930s who had to flee Germany in 1933 after Hitler’s rise to power. It was in the United States, the country that granted him citizenship, that Ackerknecht became an influential historian of medicine. He wrote groundbreaking works on the social and ecological dimensions of disease and was a forerunner of contemporary trends in social and cultural history. He became the first Chair in the history of medicine at the University of Wisconsin; the second such position in the United States.

#6778

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.

#6779

Richard Hofstadter

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...

#6780

Conway Zirkle

1895 - 1972 (77 years)

Conway Zirkle was an American botanist and historian of science. Zirkle was professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He was highly critical of Lamarckism, Lysenkoism and Marxian biology.

#6781

James Henry Oliver

1905 - 1981 (76 years)

James Henry Oliver was an American ancient historian and epigrapher, especially notable for his work on Ancient Athens. Life Oliver was born on 26 April 1905 in New York City to James Henry Oliver and Louise McGratty. He completed his undergraduate studies at Yale in 1926 and his doctoral studies at the same university in 1931. His doctoral supervisors were George Lincoln Henderson and Michael Rostovtzeff. He was a visiting student at the University of Bonn for one year and the American Academy in Rome as Jesse R. Carter fellow 1928–30. After his doctorate, he taught at Yale and then served ...

#6782

Derek J. de Solla Price

Derek J. de Solla Price

1922 - 1983 (61 years)

Derek John de Solla Price was a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist. He was known for his investigation of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek planetary computer, and for quantitative studies on scientific publications, which led to his being described as the "Herald of scientometrics".

#6783

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.

#6784

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.

#6785

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.

#6786

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.

#6787

William Croft Dickinson

1897 - 1963 (66 years)

William Croft Dickinson, CBE MC was a leading expert in the history of early modern Scotland and a writer of both children's fiction and adult ghost stories. Dickinson held the Chair of Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh from 1943 to 1963.

#6788

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.

#6789

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.

#6790

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.

#6791

Ronald Syme

1903 - 1989 (86 years)

Sir Ronald Syme, was a New Zealand-born historian and classicist. He was regarded as the greatest historian of ancient Rome since Theodor Mommsen and the most brilliant exponent of the history of the Roman Empire since Edward Gibbon. His great work was The Roman Revolution , a masterly and controversial analysis of Roman political life in the period following the assassination of Julius Caesar.

#6792

William Yandell Elliott

1896 - 1979 (83 years)

William Yandell Elliott was an American historian and a political advisor to six US presidents. Biography Born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, he served as an artillery battery commander in World War I. He attended Vanderbilt University, where he was a member of the group of poets and literary scholars known as the Fugitives. As a Rhodes Scholar, he attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and, among others, would meet the poet William Butler Yeats, the Indian nationalist Krishna Menon, and John Marshall Harlan II, a future Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

#6793

Arnold J. Toynbee

Arnold J. Toynbee

1889 - 1975 (86 years)

Arnold Joseph Toynbee was an English historian, a philosopher of history, an author of numerous books and a research professor of international history at the London School of Economics and King's College London. From 1918 to 1950, Toynbee was considered a leading specialist on international affairs; from 1924 to 1954 he was the Director of Studies at Chatham House, in which position he also produced 34 volumes of the Survey of International Affairs, a "bible" for international specialists in Britain.

#6794

Samuel Eliot Morison

Samuel Eliot Morison

1887 - 1976 (89 years)

Samuel Eliot Morison was an American historian noted for his works of maritime history and American history that were both authoritative and popular. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912, and taught history at the university for 40 years. He won Pulitzer Prizes for Admiral of the Ocean Sea , a biography of Christopher Columbus, and John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography . In 1942, he was commissioned to write a history of United States naval operations in World War II, which was published in 15 volumes between 1947 and 1962. Morison wrote the popular Oxford History of the Ame...

#6795

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.

#6796

R. G. Collingwood

R. G. Collingwood

1889 - 1943 (54 years)

Robin George Collingwood was an English philosopher, historian and archaeologist. He is best known for his philosophical works, including The Principles of Art and the posthumously published The Idea of History .

#6797

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.

#6798

Broadus Mitchell

1892 - 1988 (96 years)

Broadus Mitchell was an 20th-century American historian, writer, professor, and 1934 Socialist Party candidate for governor of Maryland. Background John Broadus Mitchell was born on December 27, 1892, in Georgetown, Kentucky. His father was a professor of classical languages. He had three siblings. In 1913, he graduated from the University of South Carolina and in 1918 earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.

#6799

George Williams Brown

1894 - 1963 (69 years)

George Williams Brown was a Canadian historian and editor. Born on April 3, 1894, in Glencoe, Middlesex County, Ontario, and died on October 19, 1963, in Ottawa, Ontario. Early life and education The son of Charles William Brown, a Methodist and United Church of Canada minister, and Ida Rebecca Brown, he grew up in Southwestern Ontario, Saskatchewan and British Columbia. After graduating in history from Victoria College, University of Toronto in 1915, he joined the Canadian Army but was invalided out and taught for a year in a Dukhobor community in Saskatchewan. He re-enlisted as a Lieutenant in the Canadian Tanks Corps, but World War I ended before he saw active service.

#6800

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.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions