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.
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List of the most influential people in History,
#7051
Emanuel Rostworowski
1923 - 1989 (66 years)
Emanuel Mateusz Rostworowski was a Polish historian, professor at Kraków's Jagiellonian University, and member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He specialized in 18th-century history. In 1965-89 he was editor-in-chief of Polski Słownik Biograficzny.
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Albert Houtin
1867 - 1926 (59 years)
Albert Houtin was a French Catholic theologian and historian with a focus on the history of doctrine and on modernism in French religion. Born in La Flèche, he grew up to become a priest and was ordained in 1891. Following the turn of the century, he became disenchanted with religion and came to regard all religious belief systems as fraudulent. In 1907, he had attended the Fourth International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston, which had been organised by Unitarians.
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Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko
1884 - 1973 (89 years)
Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko was one of the foremost Ukrainian historians of the 20th century. She was a wife of the Ukrainian academician of history and statesman Mykola Vasylenko. Life and career Polonska-Vasylenko belonged to Russian nobility; her father was a Russian Imperial officer Dmytro Menshov . Polonska-Vasylenko studied history under Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky at Kyiv University and from 1912 was a member of the Kyiv-based Historical Society of Nestor the Chronicler. From 1916, she was a lecturer at Kyiv University and Director of its archeological museum. During the 1920s, the most l...
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James Bass Mullinger
1834 - 1917 (83 years)
James Bass Mullinger , sometimes known by his pen name Theodorus, was a British author, historian, lecturer and scholar. A longtime university librarian and lecturer at St. John's College, Cambridge, Mullinger was the author of several books detailing the college's history and similar academic subjects. He was also a contributor to many periodicals of the Victorian era, most especially, Cambridge History of Modern Literature, the Dictionary of National Biography and Encyclopædia Britannica.
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José Antonio Maravall
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
José Antonio Maravall Casesnoves was a Spanish historian and essayist associated with the Generation of '36 movement. Biography Maravall studied philosophy and law at the University of Murcia, where he completed his final degree in political science and economics at the Central University, where he was a student of Jose Ortega y Gasset. He became a university professor in Spain and abroad. Maravall was head of the department at the University of La Laguna and the Complutense University of Madrid. He also became a member of the Real Academia de la Historia and the president of the Spanish A...
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Eduard Winkelmann
1838 - 1896 (58 years)
Eduard Winkelmann was a German historian. Biography He was born at Danzig in the Province of Prussia. He studied at the universities of Berlin and Göttingen, worked at the Monumenta Germaniae historica, and in 1869 became professor of history at the University of Bern, and four years later at Heidelberg. He also spent some time in the Russian Empire, where he was headmaster at the knight and chapter school in Reval beginning in 1860, and was later appointed professor at the University of Dorpat . He died at Heidelberg.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany
1807 - 1876 (69 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany was a German Lutheran theologian, historian, librarian and publicist. His rationalist outlook, influenced by Georg Friedrich Daumer, forced him to retire from his post as vicar at St. Aegidius parish in Nuremberg. He became city librarian in Nuremberg in 1841. His early publications are pamphlets against Lutheran bigotry, specifically agitating against the Old Lutheran president of the Lutheran assembly in Munich, Friedrich von Roth. In 1855, Ghillany moved to Munich, but he did not succeed in finding employment as a civil servant or diplomat, and he went on to publish multi-volume works on European history.
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Johann Georg Graevius
1632 - 1703 (71 years)
Johann Georg Graevius was a German classical scholar and critic. He was born in Naumburg, in the Electorate of Saxony. Life Graevius was originally intended for the law, but made the acquaintance of Johann Friedrich Gronovius during a casual visit to Deventer, under whose influence he abandoned jurisprudence for philology. He completed his studies under Daniel Heinsius at Leiden, and among others under the Protestant theologian David Blondel at Amsterdam.
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Tadeusz Sulimirski
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Tadeusz Joseph Sulimirski was a Polish-born British historian and archaeologist, who emigrated to the United Kingdom soon after the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Sulimirski was a pioneer and leading expert in the study of the archaeology of steppe nomads, particularly the Cimmerians, Scythians and Sarmatians.
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Karl Theodor von Heigel
1842 - 1915 (73 years)
Karl Theodor von Heigel was a German historian. He was the brother of novelist Karl August von Heigel. He studied history at the University of Munich, obtaining his habilitation for history in 1873. In 1879 he became an associate professor, and several years later, a full professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Munich. In 1885 he was appointed professor and director of the historical seminary at the university.
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Louise Nalbandian
1926 - 1974 (48 years)
Louise Ziazan Nalbandian was an American Armenian historian and professor in the History Department at California State University, Fresno from 1964 to 1974. She was the author of The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties Through the Nineteenth Century.
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Dušan Pirjevec
1921 - 1977 (56 years)
Dušan Pirjevec, known by his nom de guerre Ahac , was a Slovenian Partisan, literary historian and philosopher. He was one of the most influential public intellectuals in post–World War II Slovenia.
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Pierre Huard
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Pierre Huard was a French physician , historian of medicine and anthropologist, long in post in Indochina, dean of several faculties of medicine , rector of the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a pioneer in the history of medicine.
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Axel Olrik
1864 - 1917 (53 years)
Axel Olrik was a Danish folklorist and scholar of mediaeval historiography, and a pioneer in the methodical study of oral narrative. Olrik was born in Frederiksberg, the son of the artist Henrik Olrik. Artist Dagmar Olrik, judge Eyvind Olrik, historian Hans Olrik and cultural historian Jørgen Olrik were siblings of his.
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Auguste Carrière
1838 - 1902 (64 years)
Auguste Carrière was a linguist, grammarian and French historian, specializing in comparative grammar and Armenian culture. He was a professor at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris, and was an advocate of Armenian language studies, establishing an Armenian Chair at the school.
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Johan Kõpp
1874 - 1970 (96 years)
Johan Kõpp was an Estonian bishop and head of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church 1939–1944. Biography Kõpp went to high school at the Hugo Treffner Gymnasium in Tartu and then studied theology at the University of Tartu. He graduated from university in 1906. After his studies he initially worked as a high school teacher in Pärnu but from 1909 to 1922 was pastor in Laiuse. Already in 1916 he had however taken up a teaching position at the University of Tartu as one of the first ethnic Estonians to do so after the Estonian Declaration of Independence. From 1920 to 1927 he was deputy rector of the university, and from 1928 to 1937 rector.
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Rachel Elfreda Fowler
1872 - 1951 (79 years)
Rachel Elfreda Fowler was an English literary scholar and lecturer in art and history at the University of Oxford. Early life Rachel Fowler was born in London on 10 December 1872, the youngest daughter of Sir Robert Fowler , member of parliament and Lord Mayor of London, and his wife Sarah Charlotte Fowler, née Fox. Elfreda was one of eleven children. She received her advanced education at Westfield College and then at the University of Oxford where she studied modern languages.
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Paul Smith
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Paul J. Smith was an American music composer and violinist best known for his work at Disney. Life and career Smith was born in Calumet, Michigan on October 30, 1906. Upon graduating high school, he studied music at The College of Idaho from 1923 to 1925 before he was accepted into the Bush Conservatory of Music in Chicago, Illinois. His abilities in theory and composition earned him a scholarship to study music theory at Juilliard, however, it is unclear if he ever pursued this invitation.
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Frederic George Young
1858 - 1929 (71 years)
Frederic George Young was an educator in the U.S. state of Oregon. He was born in Burnett, Wisconsin on June 3, 1858, and after graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1886, he taught in Wisconsin and South Dakota. He moved to Portland in 1890, and served as principal at its high school and as president of Albany College before being appointed professor of economics and history at the University of Oregon in 1895. He was a founding officer of the Oregon Historical Society in 1898, and as editor of its Oregon Historical Quarterly from its founding in 1900 through the December 1928 issue. He served on the Oregon Commission for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition.
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Edward Ambrose Burgis
1673 - 1747 (74 years)
Edward Ambrose Burgis was an English Dominican historian and theologian. Biography He was born in England 1673. When a young man he left the Church of England, of which his father was a minister, and became a Catholic, joining the Dominican Order at Rome, where he passed his noviceship in the convent of Saints John and Paul on the Caelian Hill, then occupied by the English Dominicans. After his religious profession he was sent to Naples to the Dominican school of St. Thomas, where he displayed unusual mental ability.
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Dmytro Bahalii
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Dmytro Ivanovych Bahalii was a Ukrainian historian and public and political figure, one of founding members of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and a full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society since 1923. He was also a professor and rector at Kharkiv University , and mayor of Kharkiv .
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Jules Flammermont
1852 - 1899 (47 years)
Jules Gustave Flammermont was a French historian, largely known for his writings on history of the 18th century. He studied at the École pratique des Hautes Études and École des Chartes in Paris, receiving his diploma as an archivist-palaeographer in 1878. He worked as a librarian and archivist in the town of Senlis, and afterwards served as secretary to the Duke of Aumale at the Château de Chantilly. In 1883/84 he conducted archival research in Vienna and Berlin, and in 1884 received his doctorate of letters at the Sorbonne. He successively taught classes in history at the universities of Poitiers , Douai and Lille .
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Charles Alexander McMurry
1857 - 1929 (72 years)
Early life Charles Alexander McMurry was an American educator, pioneer in American Herbartianism, and brother to Frank Morton McMurry. In 1857, McMurry was born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, but following the premature death of his father, his mother moved the family to rural Illinois where he and his siblings would begin attending Normal schools, specifically in Normal, Illinois. This is where Charles McMurry would meet Edmund J. James, a prominent educational figure in economics and academia throughout Illinois universities and schools.
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Helge Dahl
1926 - 1989 (63 years)
Helge Dahl was a Norwegian educationalist. He was born in Rjukan as the son of labourers. He finished his secondary education in his hometown in 1940 and graduated with the cand.philol. degree in 1946 at the University in Oslo. From 1947 to 1957 he was a teacher at Tromsø Teacher's College, and took the dr.philos. degree in 1957 with the thesis Språkpolitikk og skolestell i Finnmark 1814–1905. He specialized in the history of education, and wrote Norsk lærerutdanning fra 1814 til i dag , Lærerutdanningen ved Universitetet i Oslo fra 1814 til i dag , Klassisisme og realisme. Den høgre skolen i Norge 1809–1869 , Norsk Lærerskolelag gjennom 75 år .
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Winston Churchill
1620 - 1688 (68 years)
Sir Winston Churchill , known as the Cavalier Colonel, was an English soldier, historian, and politician. He was the father of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough and a direct ancestor and namesake of Winston, who served as British prime minister in the 20th century during the Second World War.
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Arrigo Pacchi
1933 - 1989 (56 years)
Arrigo Pacchi was an Italian historian of philosophy. He graduated in philosophy at the University of Milan with an academic thesis in Medieval Philosophy. He dedicated his studies in particular to the natural philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and to the influence of Cartesianism in England.
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Andrew Browning
1889 - 1972 (83 years)
Andrew Browning, FBA was a Scottish historian. He was Professor of History at the University of Glasgow from 1931 to 1957. Early life and education Born in Dennistoun in Glasgow on 28 March 1889, Browning was the son of Daniel Browning, JP, the managing director of a picture frame manufacturing firm and the Liberal candidate for a Glasgow parliamentary constituency in the 1918 general election. Daniel Browning was a book collector, with over 4,000 volumes in his library. Among Andrew Browning's siblings was Robert, a journalist, and David, a lexicographer.
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David Keir
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Sir David Lindsay Keir was a British historian and educator. From 1949 to 1965, he was Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Life Keir was born at Bellingham, Northumberland, the eldest of six children to William Keir and Elizabeth Keir. His Scottish father was a Presbyterian minister, originally from Aberuthven, and moved several times during Keir's childhood, from Bellingham to Newcastle, Birkenhead, and finally Glasgow, where Keir attended the Glasgow Academy, an independent school.
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Anthony Steel
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Anthony Bedford Steel was a British historian, specialising in medieval England. He was a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, and principal of Cardiff University from 1949 to 1966. Among his publications were a monograph on the reign of Richard II, as well as a biography of the 19th-century writer Robert Smith Surtees, titled Jorrick's England. He also translated Albert Sorel's L'Europe et la Revolution Francaise into English .
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Wilhelm Junghans
1834 - 1865 (31 years)
Wilhelm Junghans was a German historian who was a native of Lüneburg. He studied under Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl at the University of Bonn, and with Georg Waitz at the University of Göttingen. In 1862 he was appointed professor at the University of Kiel, a position he held until his death in 1865 at the age of 30. At Kiel he was also secretary of the Schleswig-Holstein Historical Society.
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Abraham Halkin
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Abraham Solomon Halkin was a Jewish history professor who was the brother of Simon Halkin and cousin of Shmuel Halkin. Biography Halkin was born in 1904 in the Russian Empire, the younger brother of Simon Halkin. He is also the cousin of Shmuel Halkin.
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Jean Chapeauville
1551 - 1617 (66 years)
Jean Chapeauville was a theologian, historian and vicar general in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. Life Born in Liège, capital of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, Chapeauville made his philosophical studies at the University of Cologne and University of Louvain, and at the latter received the degree of Licentiate of Theology. He then entered the priesthood, and in 1578 was appointed one of the synodal examiners for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Liège, and in 1579 parish priest of St. Michael's in Liège. He performed the functions of the latter office for about ten years.
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Hugh Stewart
1884 - 1934 (50 years)
Hugh Stewart, was an academic, soldier and historian whose work had a major impact in both England and New Zealand. Born in Scotland, Stewart worked in Russia teaching English after completing his education. He then taught classical studies at the University of Liverpool in England and then at Canterbury College in Christchurch, New Zealand. During the First World War, he volunteered for service abroad with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. He participated in several engagements at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, and was decorated for bravery and leadership. He ended the war as a lieu...
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Zdzisław Kaczmarczyk
1911 - 1980 (69 years)
Zdzisław Kaczmarczyk was a Polish historian and director of the Western Institute in Poznań from 1964 to 1965. He was connected to the Western Institute for his whole adult life, studying there in the early 1930s and then becoming a voluntary assistant from where he climbed the academic hierarchy to become director. He remained with the institute until his death in 1980, treating it as his second home.
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Matthieu Petit-Didier
1659 - 1728 (69 years)
Matthieu Petit-Didier was a French Benedictine theologian and ecclesiastical historian. Life After studying at the Jesuit college at Nancy he joined the Benedictine Congregation of St-Vannes, in 1675, at the monastery of St-Mihiel. In 1682 he was appointed professor of philosophy and theology.
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Elisabeth Karg-Gasterstädt
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Klara Elisabeth Karg-Gasterstädt was a German medievalist, professor of German philology at the University of Leipzig and head of the effort to publish the Old High German Dictionary. Biography Karg-Gasterstädt was the daughter of Karl Gasterstädt, a factory director from Swabia, and his wife, Sophie, née Schönleber. Klara attended a teachers' college in Stuttgart from 1909 to 1912, and after graduation she was allowed to teach middle and higher grades. From there she went on to work as a substitute teacher at the Königin-Katharina-Stift, and then became a full-time teacher at the Prieser Hig...
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Charles W. Jones
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Charles W. Jones was a medievalist scholar who served on the faculties of Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley. He is noted for his work on Bede, the development of the ecclesiastical calendar, medieval hagiography, and Carolingian aesthetics. At his death a major work titled The Age of the Book: Christian Foundations of Western Literature was left unfinished.
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Georges Appert
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
Georges Appert was a French historian, academic, writer and Japanologist. He was a legal scholar and professor of law at the University of Tokyo. Career Appert was a foreign government advisor in Meiji Japan from 1879 to 1889.
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Basilius Amerbach the Younger
1533 - 1591 (58 years)
Basilius Amerbach was a lawyer, professor and collector from Basel. He was the only son of Bonifacius Amerbach. He began to study law in 1552 at the University of Tübingen. In 1553 he studied at the University of Padua where his lecturer was Marcus Mantua Benavidius. 1552, he became a law clerk at the Imperial Chamber Court in Speyer. During this time, Basilius surprised his father by choosing to live with Jacob zur Glocke, a goldsmith, rather than a lawyer. After one year as a clerk, he became a professor at the University of Basel.
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W. H. Marwick
1894 - 1982 (88 years)
William Hutton Marwick was a Scottish economic historian, specialising in the labour movement. Marwick's parents were Scottish missionaries for the United Presbyterian Church, and he was born near Calabar in Nigeria, then grew up in Jamaica. He then moved to Edinburgh and studied at George Watson's College and the University of Edinburgh. He was a conscientious objector during World War I, serving a prison term in Wormwood Scrubs, then joining the Home Office Work Scheme at Wakefield and in Wales, and from 1918 serving with the Friends' War Victims Relief.
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Antoni Knot
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Antoni Knot was a Polish scholar, historian, librarian and teacher. In 1929 he gained Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Lwów. In 1965 he became professor . From 1947 to 1949 Knot was the chief librarian of Ossolineum.
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Erna Lesky
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
Erna Lesky was an Austrian pediatrician and historian of medicine. She was the first woman on the medical faculty of the University of Vienna, and was named as "one of the most illustrious medical historians of the twentieth century" by Owen Harding Wangensteen.
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César-Egasse du Boulay
1600 - 1678 (78 years)
César-Egasse du Boulay , known as Bulaeus, was a French historian. Life He was born at the beginning of the seventeenth century at Saint-Ellier, Mayenne. After teaching humanities in the College of Navarre he occupied important positions in the University of Paris, including those of rector and historian of the university. He died on 16 October 1678.
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Otto Sutermeister
1832 - 1901 (69 years)
Friedrich Gottlieb Otto Sutermeister was a Swiss folklorist and professor at the University of Berne who collected and revised numerous folk taless, legends, fables, and proverbs. Strongly influenced by the Brothers Grimm, Sutermeister emphasized the didactic aspect of Swiss folklore and rewrote many of the tales to suit young readers. He also was editor of the works of Jeremias Gotthelf and of the "Swiss Idioticon".
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Ding Dyason
1919 - 1989 (70 years)
Diana Joan "Ding" Dyason was a highly respected Australian lecturer and historian of medicine with major teaching and life-long research interests in public health and germ theory. She is most notable in the significant impact she had in her scholarly discipline. As a woman who firstly worked in the traditional roles of research assistant and demonstrator in the non-traditional discipline of science, Dyason progressed to become a leader at a major Australian university, overcoming barriers of gender and culture at a national and international level, receiving awards and honors in the process....
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Johann Wilhelm Ridler
1772 - 1834 (62 years)
Johann Wilhelm Ridler was an author, historian and university professor. For the final twenty years of his life he was head librarian at the Vienna University Library. Biography Johann Wilhelm Ridler was born at Leitmeritz 1945
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Édouard Ardaillon
1867 - 1926 (59 years)
Édouard Muller Ardaillon was a French historian, archaeologist and geographer. Career After graduating from the Boys' Catholic College of Sainte-Marie in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, he undertook a Bachelor of Arts. He was a scholar of the lycée Louis-le-Grand from 1884 to 1887. In 1887, he enrolled in the École Normale Supérieure where he achieved the Agrégation in 1890; he then joined the École française d'Athènes .
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Robert Johnson
1583 - 1633 (50 years)
Robert Johnson was an English composer and lutenist of the late Tudor and early Jacobean eras. He is sometimes called "Robert Johnson II" to distinguish him from an earlier Scottish composer. Johnson worked with William Shakespeare providing music for some of his later plays.
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Theodor Schott
1835 - 1899 (64 years)
Theodor Schott was a German Protestant theologian, historian and librarian, known for his studies involving the history of French Protestantism. From 1853 he studied theology and philosophy at Tübinger Stift in Tübingen, and after finishing his studies, spent two years as a curate at parishes in Württemberg. From 1859 he taught classes at Hofwyl near Bern, and later on, worked as a religious instructor at the gymnasium in Stuttgart. In 1867 he became a pastor of a parish in Berg, a suburb of Stuttgart. From 1873 up until his death, he served as a librarian at the royal public library in Stutt...
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Johannes Nauclerus
1425 - 1510 (85 years)
Johannes Nauclerus was a 16th-century Swabian historian and humanist. He was born Johann Vergenhans to a noble man of the same name. As was the fashion of the time, the family's name had been Latinized, with nauclerus, meaning "skipper," being a close translation of Vergenhans, meaning "ferryman." The family's coat of arms depicted a man on a sailing ship.
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