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,
#7101
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.
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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.
Go to Profile#7103
Robert G. McCloskey
1916 - 1968 (52 years)
Robert Green McCloskey was an American political historian. McCloskey completed his doctorate in political science at Harvard University, and joined the faculty in 1948. He was secretary of the Littauer Center of Public Administration until 1954, when Arthur Maass took the position. McCloskey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. In 1966, McCloskey was named Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History and Government at Harvard. The position had been vacant since 1963, upon the death of V. O. Key. McCloskey died on 4 August 1969.
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Pearl Kibre
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Pearl Kibre was an American historian. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950 for her work on medieval science and universities. Early life and education Pearl Kibre was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Kenneth Kibre, an optometrist born in Russia, and Jane du Pione Kibre. She moved to California as a girl with her parents; she attended Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. Kibre attended the University of California at Berkeley as an undergraduate and master's student, and completed doctoral studies at Columbia University in 1936, with Lynn Thorndike as her mentor. Sh...
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Vivian Hunter Galbraith
1889 - 1976 (87 years)
Vivian Hunter Galbraith was an English historian, fellow of the British Academy and Oxford Regius Professor of Modern History. Early career Galbraith was born in Sheffield, son of David Galbraith, a secretary at the steelworks in Hadfield, and Eliza Davidson McIntosh. He moved with his family to London, and was educated at Highgate School from 1902 to 1906. The family then moved to Manchester, where he attended Manchester University from 1907, and where his lecturers included Maurice Powicke, Thomas Frederick Tout and James Tait. Galbraith would later write the biographical articles on Tout and Tait for the Dictionary of National Biography.
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Maurice Goguel
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Henry Maurice Goguel was Dean of the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris, director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études, and professor at the Sorbonne. He published a substantial body of work of historical research on early Christianity. His Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History? was an important rebuttal of the Christ myth theory.
Go to Profile#7107
Clarence Glacken
1909 - 1989 (80 years)
Clarence James Glacken was Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He was known for a 1967 magnum opus, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, that demonstrated how perceptions of the natural environment shaped the course of human events over millennia. He is recognised as a key contributor to the field of environmental history.
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F. Sherwood Taylor
1897 - 1956 (59 years)
Frank Sherwood Taylor was a British historian of science, museum curator, and chemist who was Director of the Science Museum in London, England. F. Sherwood Taylor was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset, southern England and Lincoln College, Oxford. He then undertook a PhD at University College, London in the new Department of History and Method of Science.
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Manuel Gómez-Moreno Martínez
1870 - 1970 (100 years)
Manuel Gómez-Moreno Martínez , was a Spanish archaeologist and historian. Biography Martinez was born 21 February 1870 in Granada, Spain. He is the son of noted painter and amateur archaeologist, Manuel Gómez-Moreno González and Dolores Martínez Almirón.
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Carl F. Brand
1892 - 1981 (89 years)
Carl Fremont Brand was an American historian. He was a professor of history at Stanford University for thirty-four years, and was one of the leading American authorities on the history of the British Labour Party. His books, British Labour's Rise to Power and The British Labour Party , are regarded as definitive works in this field. He built the Hoover Institution's collection of Labour Party documents, long recognized as the finest collection outside of the United Kingdom.
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F. M. Powicke
1879 - 1963 (84 years)
Sir Frederick Maurice Powicke was an English medieval historian. He was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, a professor at Queen's University, Belfast, and the Victoria University of Manchester, and from 1928 until his retirement Regius Professor at the University of Oxford. He was made a Knight Bachelor in 1946.
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K. B. McFarlane
1903 - 1966 (63 years)
Kenneth Bruce McFarlane, FBA was one of the 20th century's most influential historians of late medieval England. Life McFarlane was born on 18 October 1903, the only child of A. McFarlane, OBE. His father was a civil servant in the Admiralty and the young McFarlane's childhood was an unhappy one. This may have led to the deep melancholy that seemed to pervade much of his adult life. His family sent him to public school at Dulwich College as a day-boy. McFarlane did not particularly like the atmosphere of the public school. In 1922 he earned a scholarship to read history at Exeter College, Oxford.
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Donald Creighton
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Donald Grant Creighton was a Canadian historian whose major works include The Commercial Empire of the St-Lawrence, 1760–1850 , a detailed study on the growth of the English merchant class in relation to the St Lawrence River in Canada. His biography of John A. Macdonald, published into two parts between 1952 and 1955, was considered by many Canadian historians as re-establishing biographies as a proper form of historical research in Canada. By the 1960s Creighton began to move towards a more general history of Canada.
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Margery Perham
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Dame Margery Freda Perham was a British historian of, and writer on, African affairs. She was known especially for the intellectual force of her arguments in favour of British decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Peter Masten Dunne
1889 - 1957 (68 years)
Peter Masten Dunne was a historian of the 17th- and 18th-century Jesuit missions of northwestern New Spain. Biography Dunne was born in San Jose, California on April 16, 1889 and educated at Santa Clara College and at a seminary in Hastings, U.K. After his ordination in 1921, he served as an editor of the Jesuit magazine America in 1924–25. He taught at Santa Clara University between 1925 and 1930. In 1934, he received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California with a dissertation on “The Four Rivers: Early Jesuit Missions on the Pacific Coast”, prepared under the direction of Herbert Eugene Bolton.
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Elizabeth Wiskemann
1899 - 1971 (72 years)
Elizabeth Meta Wiskemann was an English journalist and historian of Anglo-German ancestry. She was an intelligence officer in World War II, and the Montagu Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.
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Arthur R. M. Lower
1889 - 1988 (99 years)
Arthur Reginald Marsden Lower was a Canadian historian and "liberal nationalist" interested in Canadian economic history, particularly the forest trade, and in Canada–US relations. He was the most nationalistic of Canadian historians, and highly distrustful of immigrants, Americans and any others outside of what he considered to be the Canadian family. The staple theory of Harold Innis influenced his research, much of which focused on the Canadian lumber industry. He was also strongly influenced by the ideas of American historian Frederick Jackson Turner regarding the influence of the frontier – The West – on distinctly American characteristics.
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George Rogers Taylor
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
George Rogers Taylor was an American economic historian, best known for his 1951 work The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. Biography Taylor was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. He was the son of Webb Vine Taylor and Grace Rogers. He received his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago. He graduated in 1914 from Wayland Academy at Beaver Dam and from what was then Oshkosh Normal School in 1916. He earned his way through college by waiting on tables, mowing lawns and tending furnaces. After his graduation from Oshkosh Normal School, he served a year as principal of a small elementary school at Waukesha and then enlisted for two years in the U.S.
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Samuel Flagg Bemis
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Samuel Flagg Bemis was an American historian and biographer. For many years he taught at Yale University. He was also president of the American Historical Association and a specialist in American diplomatic history. He was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes. Jerald A. Combs says he was "the greatest of all historians of early American diplomacy."
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Frank Stenton
1880 - 1967 (87 years)
Sir Frank Merry Stenton FBA was an English historian of Anglo-Saxon England, a professor of history at the University of Reading , president of the Royal Historical Society , Reading University's vice-chancellor .
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George Wynn Brereton Huntingford
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
George Wynn Brereton Huntingford was an English linguist, anthropologist and historian. He lectured in East African languages and cultures at SOAS, University of London from 1950 until 1966. In 1966, Huntingford went to Canada to organise the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Brunswick at Fredericton, and retired to Málaga the next year, where he lived after his retirement.
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Richard B. Morris
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Richard Brandon Morris was an American historian best known for his pioneering work in colonial American legal history and the early history of American labor. In later years, he shifted his research interests to the constitutional, diplomatic, and political history of the American Revolution and the making of the United States Constitution.
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Arthur N. Holcombe
1884 - 1977 (93 years)
Arthur Norman Holcombe was an American political scientist and educator who taught at Harvard University from 1910 until his retirement in 1955. He was known for his studies of government structure.
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Herbert J. Muller
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
Herbert J. Muller was an American historian, academic, government official and writer. He received his education at Cornell University. He taught at Cornell, Purdue and Indiana University , served in the Department of State, the War Production Board, and frequently lectured abroad.
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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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Frederick L. Schuman
1904 - 1981 (77 years)
Frederick Lewis Schuman was an American professor of history, political science and international relations at Williams College. Career Schuman was a professor of history at University of Chicago and then for 32 years at Williams College. He analyzed international relations and social science, focusing on the period between World War I and World War II.
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Rodolphe Guilland
1888 - 1981 (93 years)
Rodolphe Joseph Guilland was a French Byzantinist. Life Born in 1888, he completed his thesis on Nikephoros Gregoras , and succeeded his teacher Charles Diehl in the seat of Byzantine studies at the Sorbonne in 1934, which he held until his retirement in 1958. His chief interest was in the late Byzantine period , particularly the Palaiologan period, and his main areas of research were the history of the Great Palace of Constantinople, and of the offices, dignities, and administrative apparatus of the Byzantine state.
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Arthur Stanley Tritton
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
Arthur Stanley Tritton was a British Arabist. He wrote a number of books on Islam and its history, and from 1938 to 1946 was Professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Life Tritton was born on 25 February 1881. His father was the senior pastor of a Congregational church in Great Yarmouth, but when Tritton was still young the family moved to Wandsworth.
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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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Albert T. Olmstead
1880 - 1945 (65 years)
Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead was an American historian and academic, who specialized in Assyriology. Olmstead was born in 1880 in New York, and died in 1945 in Chicago. He was Professor of Oriental History at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Among his doctoral students was Neilson C. Debevoise, later an influential historian of the Parthian Empire.
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Joseph Needham
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, initiating publication of the multivolume Science and Civilisation in China. A focus of his was what has come to be called the Needham Question of why and how China had ceded its leadership in Science and Technology to Western countries.
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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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John Farquhar Fulton
1899 - 1960 (61 years)
John Farquhar Fulton was an American neurophysiologist and historian of science. He received numerous degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University. He taught at Magdalen College School of Medicine at Oxford and later became the youngest Sterling Professor of Physiology at Yale University. His main contributions were in primate neurophysiology and history of science.
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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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Charles A. Beard
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Charles Austin Beard was an American historian and professor, who wrote primarily during the first half of the 20th century. A history professor at Columbia University, Beard's influence is primarily due to his publications in the fields of history and political science. His works included a radical re-evaluation of the Founding Fathers of the United States, whom he believed to be more motivated by economics than by philosophical principles. Beard's most influential book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States , has been the subject of great controversy ever since its publication.
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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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Thomas McKeown
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
Thomas McKeown was a British physician, epidemiologist and historian of medicine. Largely based on demographic data from England and Wales, McKeown argued that the population growth since the late eighteenth century was due to improving economic conditions, i.e. better nutrition, rather than to better hygiene, public health measures and improved medicine . This became known as the "McKeown thesis".
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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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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.
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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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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".
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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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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 ...
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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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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.
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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.
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