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.
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List of the most influential people in History,
#7051
Ivy Pinchbeck
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Ivy Pinchbeck was a British economic and social historian, specialising in the history of women. Her book of 1930,Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750 – 1850 was a pioneering effort in women's history, and highly influential in the next half-century. She concluded that women overall gained more than they lost from the Industrial Revolution, as compared to the dangers and unsanitary and harsh working conditions of the previous era.
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Levette J. Davidson
1894 - 1957 (63 years)
Levette J. Davidson was a nationally acclaimed expert in folklore, especially that of Colorado and the West. He was born in Eureka, Illinois May 16, 1894, one of four children. Because his grand uncle was past-President of Eureka College, a Christian seminary, Davidson was reared in the school's shadow with the option of becoming either a teacher or a preacher. He chose teaching and was awarded his B.A. from Eureka in 1915. A year later he received his A.M. degree from the University of Illinois where he received Phi Beta Kappa honors. In 1917 he earned his M.A. in social science and history at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#7053
John Bowle
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
John Edward Bowle was an English historian and writer. Education He was educated at Marlborough College. There his contemporaries included John Betjeman, who became a friend, and Anthony Blunt, about whom he was consistently negative. He was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was counted as an Aesthete. Bowle left Oxford with a Third in Modern History, 1927.
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C. Doris Hellman
1910 - 1973 (63 years)
Clarisse Doris Hellman Pepper was an American historian of science, "one of the first professional historians of science in the United States". She specialized in 16th- and 17th-century astronomy, wrote a book on the Great Comet of 1577, and was the translator of another book, a biography of Johannes Kepler. She became a professor at the Pratt Institute and later at the Queens College, City University of New York, and was recognized by membership in several selective academic societies.
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Noël Denholm-Young
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Noël Denholm-Young was an English historian. He was a Fellow and archivist of Magdalen College, Oxford specialising in the political history of late medieval England. He worked as keeper of Western manuscripts at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and later in the faculty of the University College of North Wales, Bangor. Among his publications was an edition of the chronicle Vita Edwardi Secundi.
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Rodman W. Paul
1912 - 1987 (75 years)
Rodman Wilson Paul was an American historian who taught at the California Institute of Technology. He was known primarily as a foremost authority on California mining and agricultural Native American history.
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John Leonard Clive
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
John Leonard Clive was an American historian. He was a professor at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He is most well known for his biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, for which he won the National Book Award for Biography and History.
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Andreas Hillgruber
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Andreas Fritz Hillgruber was a conservative German historian who was influential as a military and diplomatic historian who played a leading role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. In his controversial book Zweierlei Untergang, he wrote that historians should "identify" with the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front and asserted that there was no moral difference between Allied policies towards Germany in 1944 and 1945 and the genocide waged against the Jews. The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Hillgruber was a great historian whose once-sterling reputation was in ruins as ...
Go to Profile#7059
Romilly Jenkins
1907 - 1969 (62 years)
Romilly James Heald Jenkins was a British scholar in Byzantine and Modern Greek studies. He occupied the prestigious seat of Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London, in 1946–1960.
Go to Profile#7060
Lewis Eldon Atherton
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Lewis Eldon Atherton was an American historian and academic from Missouri. He taught at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, for over 30 years. Early life Atherton was born on March 1, 1905, in the small town of Bosworth, Missouri. He was the son of Caleb Franklin Atherton and Ethel Framer. Although born in Missouri, his family originated from Brown County, Ohio. His early years were spent on the family farm.
Go to Profile#7061
Hugh Pemberton
Hugh R. Pemberton, FRHistS, is an academic historian specialising in the late twentieth-century British politics and British social and economic policy. As of 2018, he is Professor of Contemporary British History at the University of Bristol.
Go to Profile#7062
Thomas J. Wertenbaker
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker was a leading American historian and the second Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University. Early and family life Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, he was the youngest son of former CSA Colonel Charles C. Wertenbaker and his wife Fanny .
Go to Profile#7063
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.
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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.
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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."
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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...
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Cecil Roth
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Cecil Roth was a British Jewish historian. He was editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Life Roth was born in Dalston, London, on 5 March 1899. His parents were Etty and Joseph Roth, and Cecil was the youngest of their four sons. In childhood, Cecil received a traditional Jewish religious education, including studying Hebrew with Jacob Mann. He went to school at City of London School. He fought in the First World War, seeing active duty in France in 1918.
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Arnaldo Momigliano
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Arnaldo Dante Momigliano, KBE, FBA was an Italian historian of classical antiquity, known for his work in historiography, and characterised by Donald Kagan as "the world's leading student of the writing of history in the ancient world".
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Richard Harrison Shryock
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Richard Harrison Shryock was an American medical historian, specializing in the connection of medical history with general history. Biography Shryock studied at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy and then at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating there with a bachelor's degree in 1917 and a PhD in American history in 1924. Before 1917 he taught school in Philadelphia. During WWI he served as a private in the United States Army Ambulance Service. He was instructor of history from 1921 to 1924 at Ohio State University and from 1924 to 1925 at the University of Pennsylvania. In Duke Univers...
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Stavro Skëndi
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Stavro Skëndi was an Albanian American linguist and historian. Career Skendi studied at Robert College in Istanbul, graduating in 1928. He continued his studies at the University of Geneva and returned to Albania, where he taught in Commerce schools. In 1946, he emigrated to the U.S. He enrolled at Columbia University as a Ph.D. candidate, graduating in 1951. He joined the faculty as a lecturer in a program on East-Central Europe, specializing in Balkan language studies. He succeeded Nelo Drizari as lecturer and taught courses in Albanian and South Slavic at Columbia from 1954 until his retirement in 1972.
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Solomon Zeitlin
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Solomon Zeitlin was an American Jewish historian, Talmudic scholar and in his time the world's leading authority on the Second Commonwealth, also known as the Second Temple period. His work The Rise and Fall of the Judean State is about the Second Temple period.
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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.
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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 .
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Oskar Halecki
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Oskar Halecki was a Polish historian, social and Catholic activist. Doctor Honoris Causa of the Polish University Abroad . Life and career Halecki, whose first name is sometimes spelled Oscar in English-language sources, was born in Vienna to a Polish officer serving in the Austrian Army. His father, Oscar Chalecki-Halecki, achieved the rank of lieutenant field-marshal. His mother was Leopoldina deDellimanic.
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Charles Norris Cochrane
1889 - 1945 (56 years)
Charles Norris Cochrane was a Canadian historian and philosopher who taught at the University of Toronto. He is known for his writings about the interaction between ancient Rome and emerging Christianity.
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Hilda Neatby
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Hilda Marion Ada Neatby was a Canadian historian and educator. Early life and education Hilda Marion Ada Neatby was born on February 19, 1904, in Sutton , to Andrew Neatby and Ada Fisher. The family moved to Saskatchewan when Hilda was 2. She received a BA and MA from the University of Saskatchewan and a PhD from the University of Minnesota. She taught history at the University of Saskatchewan and was head of the history department from 1958 to 1969. Fluent in French, she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris.
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Dineshchandra Sircar
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Dineshchandra Sircar , also known as D. C. Sircar or D. C. Sarkar, was an epigraphist, historian, numismatist and folklorist, known particularly in India and Bangladesh for his work deciphering inscriptions. He was the Chief Epigraphist of the Archaeological Survey of India , Carmichael Professor of Ancient Indian History and Culture at the University of Calcutta and the General President of the Indian History Congress. In 1972, Sircar was awarded the Sir William Jones Memorial Plaque.
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William Reginald Halliday
1886 - 1966 (80 years)
Sir William Reginald Halliday was a historian and archaeologist who served as Principal of King's College London from 1928 to 1952. Born in British Honduras in 1886, Halliday was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford graduating with a first in Literae Humaniores. He also spent time studying at the Berlin University and at the British School at Athens. He lectured in Greek History and Archaeology and the University of Glasgow before becoming Rathbone Professor of Ancient History at the University of Liverpool . He was then made Principal of King's College London in 1928, and remained in the post until 1952.
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Paul Frederick Brissenden
1885 - 1974 (89 years)
Paul Frederick Brissenden was an American labor historian, who wrote on various labor issues in the first half of the 20th century. He is perhaps best known for his 1919 work on the Industrial Workers of the World, entitled The IWW: a Study of American Syndicalism.
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Solon J. Buck
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
Solon Justus Buck was the Second Archivist of the United States. His academic career, never straying very far from his interest in the history of agricultural communities, started with a brief appointment to Indiana University followed by two years at the University of Illinois, which he left for the University of Minnesota in 1914, becoming also superintendent of the Minnesota State Historical Society. During his long tenure in Minnesota he fought hard for the state's history, helping organize county historical societies, founding a quarterly periodical, and moving the Historical Society fro...
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Charles Henry Oldfather
1887 - 1954 (67 years)
Charles Henry Oldfather was an American professor of Greek and Ancient History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He was born in Tabriz, Persia. Parentage Oldfather's parents, Jeremiah and Felicia, were missionaries in Persia for 19 years. They emigrated to the United States when Charles was aged two years. His father was born in Farmsberg, Ohio in 1842 and his mother was from Covington, Indiana.
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Hans W. Gatzke
1915 - 1987 (72 years)
Hans Wilhelm Gatzke was a German-born historian of German foreign policy since World War I and belonged to the young emigrants from Nazi Germany who became historians in the United States. He is remembered by a named professorship in his honor at Williams College and a named dissertation prize at Yale University.
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Pierre Wuilleumier
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Pierre Wuilleumier was a 20th-century French scholar, normalian, professor of Latin language and literature at the Sorbonne and archaeologist. Biography Pierre Wuilleumier held the chair of National Antiquities in Lyon from 1933. In 1940, he was responsible for the excavations of the ancient Theatre of Fourvière on the hill of Fourvière with Amable Audin. From 1941 to 1954, he directed two constituencies of Historic Antiquities in the Lyon region. He contributed to the magazine Gallia since its creation in 1942, in which he regularly published the results of excavations on the hill of Fourviè...
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Arrell Gibson
1921 - 1987 (66 years)
Arrell Morgan Gibson was a historian and author specializing in the history of the state of Oklahoma. Gibson was born in Pleasanton, Kansas on December 1, 1921. He earned degrees from Missouri Southern State College and the University of Oklahoma. He is best known for writing Oklahoma: A History of Five Centuries and The Oklahoma Story . He died in Norman, Oklahoma on November 30, 1987. There have been two literary awards created in Gibson's honor. The Oklahoma Center For The Book grants its Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award annually to an Oklahoman for a body of literary work. The...
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Lao Genevra Simons
1870 - 1949 (79 years)
Lao Genevra Simons also referred to as Lao G. Simons, was an American mathematician, writer, and historian of mathematics known for her influential book Fabre and Mathematics and Other Essays. Simons was head of the mathematics department at Hunter College in New York.
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Newman Ivey White
1892 - 1948 (56 years)
Newman Ivey White was an American professor of English at Duke University. He was born in Statesville, North Carolina, United States. He was a noted Shelley scholar, as well as a collector of American folklore, including folk songs and Duke limericks. He served as Professor of English at Trinity College and Duke University from 1919 to 1948. He wrote American Negro Folk Songs and in it he quoted a work song, sung by laborers in Augusta, Georgia, which mentioned the notorious Judge Fogarty. White also recalled hearing a version in Statesville, North Carolina in 1903.
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Andrew J. Newman
1900 - Present (126 years)
Andrew J. Newman holds the chair of Islamic Studies and Persian at the University of Edinburgh. Education and career Newman majored in history at Dartmouth College, graduating summa cum laude. He went to the University of California, Los Angeles for graduate study in Islamic studies, and earned his Ph.D. there. After postdoctoral research at Green Templeton College, Oxford, affiliated with Oxford's Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, he joined the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1996.
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Heinrich Wieleitner
1874 - 1931 (57 years)
Heinrich Wieleitner was a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He became an honorary professor of mathematics at the University of Munich but for much of his career worked in school- and college-level education.
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George Hubbard Blakeslee
1871 - 1954 (83 years)
George Hubbard Blakeslee was an academic, professor of history and international relations at Clark University, and a founder of the Journal of Race Development, the first American journal devoted to international relations. This journal was later renamed the Journal of International Relations, which in turn was merged with Foreign Affairs.
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Harold J. Grimm
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Harold J. Grimm was an academic, historian, and writer and an expert on the Reformation. Born in Saginaw in Michigan in 1901, Grimm gained his PhD at Ohio State University. Grimm's numerous posts as an educator included Professor of History at Capital University, the Ohio State University, and Indiana University. He was department chairman at Ohio State and Indiana universities. In 1978, Grimm received the Distinguished Teacher award at Ohio State University. He was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow at the University of Freiburg.
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Jaime Eyzaguirre
1908 - 1968 (60 years)
Jaime Eyzaguirre was a Chilean lawyer, essayist and historian. He is variously recognized as a writer of Spanish traditionalist or conservative historiography in his country. Early life and marriage Eyzaguirre was born into a religious upper-class family in Santiago. As young man he studied law in the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and was member of the Catholic student organization Asociación Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos. During his studies he was influenced by the Jesuit Fernando Vives and the writings of Manuel Lacunza.
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Joseph Rayback
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Joseph G. Rayback was a professor of history in the United States. Career He served in the United States Navy and earned a Ph.D. in American history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. For many years, he was a professor of history and chair of the department at Pennsylvania State University. He was faculty advisor to Phi Alpha Theta, the honorary in history and with Donald B. Hoffmann helped to organize the society on a national basis. He served on the editorial board of the journal, The Historian, published by Phi Alpha Theta. Following service at Penn State, Rayback taught American history at the University of Saskatchewan in western Canada.
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Ola Elizabeth Winslow
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
Ola Elizabeth Winslow was an American historian, biographer, and educator. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for her biography of Jonathan Edwards, an 18th-century American theologian whose basic writings she edited for Signet Classics.
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Heinz Heimsoeth
1886 - 1975 (89 years)
Heinz Heimsoeth was a German historian of philosophy. Biography He was born in Cologne. Heimsoeth began his studies at Heidelberg in 1905, but soon transferred to Berlin, where he studied with Wilhelm Dilthey, Alois Riehl, and Ernst Cassirer. Due to his interest in Kant he transferred in 1907 to Marburg, where he studied with Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. He graduated in 1911 with a thesis on Descartes. After a year studying in Paris with Henri Bergson he was habilitated with a thesis on Leibniz.
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Malcolm Caldwell
1931 - 1978 (47 years)
James Alexander Malcolm Caldwell was a Scottish academic and a prolific Marxist writer. He was a consistent critic of American foreign policy, a campaigner for Asian communist and socialist movements and a supporter of the Khmer Rouge. Caldwell was murdered under mysterious circumstances a few hours after meeting Pol Pot in Cambodia.
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Lilian Knowles
1870 - 1926 (56 years)
Lilian Charlotte Anne Knowles was a British historian and Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics in the 1920s. She was the first female Dean of the Economic History Faculty in the University of London.
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Walter S. Huxford
1892 - 1958 (66 years)
Walter Scott Huxford was an American professor of physics at Northwestern University and was a co-inventor of the sunburnometer. Education His education included a bachelor's degree at Doane College, a master's degree at the University of Nebraska, and a PhD degree at the University of Michigan in 1928, with a thesis entitled: Determination of the Charge of Positive Thermions form Measurements of the Shot Effect.
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Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
1877 - 1934 (57 years)
#7099
Preserved Smith
1880 - 1941 (61 years)
Preserved Smith was an American historian of the Protestant Reformation. He was the son of Henry Preserved Smith, a scholar of the Old Testament, and inherited his name from a line of Puritan ancestors stretching back to the 17th century. He attended Amherst College and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1907, and continued studies at the Sorbonne and the University of Berlin. Like his mentor James Harvey Robinson at Columbia, he had a high respect for science and a belief that knowledge of history was a way to improve human prospects for the future. He taught at Cornell University as a member of the Department of History from 1923 to 1941.
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Hugh Talmage Lefler
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Hugh Talmage Lefler was a historian known for his work on the history of North Carolina. He was born in Cooleemee, North Carolina, and grew up on a farm in Davie County. He taught at the University of North Carolina for many years and authored a number of books. His book The Growth of North Carolina was used as the standard state history textbook in North Carolina public schools. His book North Carolina, History of a Southern State was the leading text on the subject. Author Sam Ragan, writing in the North Carolina Historical Review, wrote that Lefler "made history come alive in the classroom...
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