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,
#7251
Johann Heinrich Joseph Düntzer
1813 - 1901 (88 years)
Johann Heinrich Joseph Düntzer was a German philologist and historian of literature. Biography He was born at Cologne. After studying philology and especially ancient classics and Sanskrit at Bonn and Berlin , he took the degree of doctor of philosophy and established himself in 1837 at Bonn as privatdozent for classical philology. He had already, in his Goethes Faust in seiner Einheit und Ganzheit and Goethe als Dramatiker , advocated a new critical method in interpreting the German classics, which he wished to see treated like the ancient classics.
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Charles Rogers
1825 - 1890 (65 years)
Charles Rogers was a 19th-century Scottish minister and prolific author. In the second half of his life, he repeatedly ran into trouble for setting up publication societies from which he gained financial benefit.
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Louis Ellies du Pin
1657 - 1719 (62 years)
Louis Ellies du Pin or Dupin was a French ecclesiastical historian, who was responsible for the . Childhood and education Dupin was born at Paris, coming from a noble family of Normandy. His mother, a Vitart, was the niece of Marie des Moulins, grandmother of the poet Jean Racine. When ten years old he entered the college of Harcourt, where he graduated M.A. in 1672. At the age of twenty, he accompanied Racine, who made a visit to Nicole for the purpose of becoming reconciled to the gentlemen of Port Royal. But, while not hostile to the Jansenists, Dupin's intellectual attraction was in another direction; he was the disciple of Jean Launoy, a learned critic and a Gallican.
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Jakob Middendorp
1537 - 1611 (74 years)
Jakob Middendorp was a Dutch Catholic theologian and churchman, academic and historian. Life Middendorp was born about 1537 in Oldenzaal, or perhaps Ootmarsum, as he called himself Otmersensis on the title page of his work . He studied the humanities at the Fragerherren gymnasium of Zwolle, philosophy and jurisprudence at Cologne University, where he became doctor of philosophy and both branches of law, and also licentiate of theology; he also taught peripatetic philosophy at the Montanum gymnasium there.
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Michael Freund
1902 - 1972 (70 years)
Michael Freund was German historian and Professor at the University of Kiel. Freund's view was that Louis Napoleon was the only real revolutionist in 1848. Freund wrote, "After the solemn republican respectablity of 1848 it seemed that only with the Napoleonic experiment did a great revolutionary élan appear on the stage of history". "The state created by Napoleon was anti-socialist, but it was not the laissez-faire state of capitalism. The social ideals of the disciples of Saint-Simon were given by Napoleon, for the first time, a military and authoritarian aspect."
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Adrianus Barlandus
1486 - 1538 (52 years)
Adriaan van Baarland or Adrianus Barlandus or Hadrianus Barlandus was a Dutch historian of merit. He was born in the village of Baarland, from which he took his name. He studied at Ghent and Leuven, at which latter place he was elected professor of eloquence at the Collegium Trilingue in 1526, after a stay of some years in England. He died in Leuven in 1538, and was succeeded at the Collegium Trilingue by Conrad Goclenius.
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William Parker
William Parker was an English captain and privateer, and also Mayor of Plymouth. He was born near Plymouth and was a member of the lesser gentry but he became one of the owners of the Merchants house & in 1601 became mayor of Plymouth before becoming a privateer in the services of Queen Elizabeth. In 1587 he sailed in consort with Sir Francis Drake during Drake's raid on raid on Cadiz, Spain.
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Kinnosuke Ogura
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Kinnosuke Ogura was a Japanese mathematician and historian of mathematics. He graduated in 1905 from Tokyo College of Science , and was a lecturer there from 1910 to 1911. He was assistant at the Department of Mathematics of the new Tohoku Imperial University from 1911 to 1917, and received his Ph.D. in 1916 with a thesis on trajectories in the conservative field of force. He did research in France for two years, from 1919 to 1922. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1920 at Strasbourg.
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Christoph Brouwer
1559 - 1617 (58 years)
Christoph Brouwer was a Jesuit priest of the Netherlands, and ecclesiastical historian. He is particularly known for his contribution to the history of the Archdiocese of Trier. Life Brouwer was born in Arnhem, The Netherlands. In 1580 he entered the Society of Jesus, and after a thorough humanistic training, devoted himself especially to the study of church history. His attainments in other branches of learning are shown by his appointment as professor of philosophy at Trier; later he was appointed rector, first at Fulda, and then at Trier. His chief work was entitled: Antiquitates et annales Trevirenses et episcoporum Treverensis ecclesiae suffragorum.
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Ludwig Häusser
1818 - 1867 (49 years)
Ludwig Häusser was a German historian. Biography Häusser was born at Cleebourg, in Alsace. Studying philology at Heidelberg in 1835, he was led by F. C. Schlosser to give it up for history, and after continuing his historical work at Jena and teaching in the gymnasium at Wertheim he made his mark by his Die teutschen Geschichtsschreiber vom Anfang des Frankenreichs bis auf die Hohenstaufen . Next year appeared his Sage von Tell.
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Arthur May
Arthur James May was an historian, a professor, and "an authority on the history of modern Europe." May was born in Rockdale, Pennsylvania. He received a Bachelor's Degree from Wesleyan University and a Master's and Doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. "He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University" before he came to the University of Rochester in 1925.
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Robert Granville Caldwell
1882 - 1976 (94 years)
Robert Granville Caldwell was an American historian, author, and diplomat who served as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States to Portugal and to Bolivia, and held teaching posts at Rice University, MIT, and other institutions.
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Svante Dahlström
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Svante Dahlström was a Finland-Swedish historian. He married music educator Greta Dahlström in 1925 and was the father of musicologist . Dahlström was born in Turku, Finland, in 1883 to Johan Edvard Dahlström and Augusta Charlotta Hallqvist. After graduating in 1901, he received his bachelor of philosophy in 1910 and worked for the national archive from 1912 to 1917. He was the first administrative director of the Åbo Academy Foundation from 1917 to 1920 and secretary of the academy's consistory from 1918 to 1944. At the University of Helsinki, Dahlström was the secretary of the student socie...
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Felix Stieve
1845 - 1898 (53 years)
Felix Stieve was a German historian. He was the father of anatomist Hermann Stieve . He studied history at the universities of Breslau, Berlin, Innsbruck and Munich, obtaining his habilitation at the latter institution in 1874. In 1878 he became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and from 1886, taught classes as a professor at the Technische Hochschule in Munich.
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Leopold Prowe
1821 - 1887 (66 years)
Leopold Friedrich Prowe was a German historian and gymnasium instructor, born as the son of a town councillor of Thorn in West Prussia , the town where in 1473 the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was born. Prowe compiled a comprehensive German language biography of Copernicus, titled Nicolaus Coppernicus.
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Caspar Schütz
1540 - 1594 (54 years)
Caspar Schütz was a German historian. Schütz was born in Eisleben. As professor of poetry at the University of Königsberg from 1562 to 1565, he developed interest in the history of Prussia. He then became the historian of the city of Danzig and collected old writings and records. His main work, published in 1592 in Zerbst, was the Historia Rerum Prussicarum or "wahrhafte Beschreibung der Lande Preussen in 10 Büchern vom Anfange bis auf das Jahr 1525". He died in Danzig.
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Harald Beyer
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Carl Harald Beyer was a Norwegian literary historian and lecturer, literary critic, textbook writer and professor of European literature at the University of Bergen. Early and personal life Beyer was born in Bergen, as a son of bookseller Freydar Dekke Høegh von Krogh Beyer and his German-born wife Flora Charlotte Müller . He was grandson of bookbinder Fredrik Beyer . He married Eidis Johannessen in 1919, and was the father of literary historian Edvard Beyer.
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Nicolaas Godfried van Kampen
1776 - 1839 (63 years)
Nicolaas Godfried van Kampen was a Dutch Mennonite author and deacon. While never university educated, he studied literature and history and published a large number of writings, including a history of the French domination of Europe . In 1829 he was called to teach Dutch literature and history at the Athenaeum of Amsterdam.
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D. K. Wilgus
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Donald Knight Wilgus was an American folk song scholar and academic, most recognized for chronicling 'Hillbilly', blues music and Irish-American song and his contribution to ballad scholarship. Early life and education Wilgus was born on December 1, 1918, at West Mansfield, Logan County, Ohio, and attended East High School and obtained his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Ohio State University.
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Karl Werner
1821 - 1888 (67 years)
Karl Werner was an Austrian theologian. Works In the second half of nineteenth century, he published monographs related to the doctrines of the great doctors of the medieval and 16th century scholastic. The monographs addressed the thought of, among others, Roger Bacon, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Francisco Suarez.
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François Baudouin
1520 - 1573 (53 years)
François Baudouin , also called Balduinus, was a French jurist, Christian controversialist and historian. Among the most colourful of the noted French humanists, he was respected by his contemporaries as a statesman and jurist, even as they frowned upon his perceived inconstancy in matters of faith: he was noted as a Calvinist who converted to Catholicism.
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Stanislas Bormans
1835 - 1912 (77 years)
Stanislas Marie Bormans was a Belgian archivist and historian. Life Bormans was born in Hasselt on 2 February 1835. When he was a few months old, his father, Jean-Henri Bormans, was appointed a professor at the University of Ghent. Two years later he transferred to the University of Liège.
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Richard Millman
1932 - 1983 (51 years)
Richard Millman was an American historian at the University of Illinois. Millman was appointed instructor at Temple University for 1960–1961. His 1979 work on Benjamin Disraeli's policy during the Great Eastern Crisis of 1875–78 was called the "authoritative account" by M. R. D. Foot and a "masterly achievement" by John Vincent. According to Richard Shannon, Millman "challenges the Seton-Watsonian tradition and boldly essays to restore the credibility of Disraeli's attempt to reassert the Palmerstonian tradition of maintaining the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire as a capital...
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Tache Papahagi
1892 - 1977 (85 years)
Tache Papahagi was an Aromanian folklorist and linguist. He was born into an Aromanian family in Avdella , a village that formed part of the Ottoman Empire's Manastir Vilayet and is now in Greece. He attended primary school in his native village, followed from 1902 to 1912 by studies at the Romanian high schools in Ioannina and Bitola. From 1912 to 1916, he went to the literature and philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest in Romania. In 1925, he obtained a doctorate in philology from the same institution; his thesis dealt with the Maramureș dialect and folklore. He was a high school teacher at Târgu Neamț from 1916 to 1918.
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Herbert Krause
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
Herbert Arthur Krause was an American historian, author and college professor. He was born and educated in Minnesota and South Dakota, where he taught and wrote. He was the author of novels, plays, poems, essays, and reviews. He also worked towards preservation of cultural heritage.
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Karl Helm
1871 - 1960 (89 years)
Karl Helm was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies Biography Karl Helm was born in Karlsruhe, Germany on 19 May 1871. He studied German philology in Heidelberg and Freiburg, earning his doctorate in 1895 with a study on 16th-century poetry.
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James Hight
1870 - 1958 (88 years)
Sir James Hight was a New Zealand university professor, educational administrator and historian. He was born in Halswell in Christchurch, New Zealand on 3 November 1870. He died on 17 May 1958 and is buried at Linwood Cemetery.
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Anatol Lewicki
1841 - 1899 (58 years)
Anatol Lewicki was a Polish historian. Anatol Lewicki was son of Grzegorz Lewicki, Greek-Catholic provost in Prysowce. He was buried at the Rakowicki Cemetery in Kraków. Footnotes External links
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Gerard Geldenhouwer
1482 - 1542 (60 years)
Gerardus Geldenhouwer was a Dutch historian and Protestant reformer. Geldenhouwer descended from a patrician family of Nijmegen, where he was born. His father, also named Gerard, was chamberservant at the court of Arnold of Egmond and Adolf of Egmond, dukes of Guelders. He followed an education at the Latin school in Deventer, before he joined the Augustinians. After this he studied at Leuven. Here he wrote his first publications, amongst which are a collection of Satires in the trend of Erasmus' Praise of Folly. In this period he also oversaw the printing of several works of Erasmus and Thom...
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Pieter Lodewijk Muller
1842 - 1904 (62 years)
Pieter Lodewijk Muller was a Dutch historian. He published numerous works of history and also contributed nearly two hundred entries to the German Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie . Life Muller was born in Koog aan de Zaan , the third son of Christiaan Muller and Isabella Muller de Cercq . Christiaan Muller was a Mennonite preacher in Koog aan de Zaan and Zaandijk. His mother, who came from a prosperous Dutch family, died when he was only two. The Muller name, written in older documents as Müller, reflected the family's German provenance. Pieter's grandfather, Samuel, and his great uncle, Johannes, had relocated around 1800 from Krefeld to Amsterdam to set up a bookshop.
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Paulus Merula
1558 - 1607 (49 years)
Paulus Merula, or Paul van Merle was a Dutch jurist, classicist, historian, geographer and librarian. In 1592 he was appointed professor of history at Leiden University, and was elevated to full professor in 1593. From 1597 until his death he was librarian to Leiden University Library, and in 1603 he was appointed rector magnificus of the university. He was friends with Janus Dousa and Daniël Heinsius, and was a Leiden contemporary of the humanist Joseph Justus Scaliger.
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Annette Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven
1909 - 1989 (80 years)
Annette Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven was an Irish historian specialising in medieval Irish history, and was among the earliest female academics appointed in Trinity College Dublin. Family Otway-Ruthven was the daughter of Captain Robert Mervyn Bermingham Otway-Ruthven , Royal Artillery, of Castle Otway, County Tipperary, and Margaret Casement , of Cronroe, County Wicklow. She had three sisters and a brother; two of her sisters died young. Through her mother Otway-Ruthven was related to Roger Casement.
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Carlo Malagola
1855 - 1910 (55 years)
Carlo Malagola was a 19th-century Italian historian. Among others, he studied the archives of Bologna, and the life of Antonio Urceo , called Codro , who had taught Greek to Nicolaus Copernicus. Malagola discovered that according to the note Dominus Nicolaus Kopperlingk de Thorn - IX grossetos the young Prussian had enrolled in the Acta nationis Germanorum at Bologna in 1496 for the fee of 9 Groschen.
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Émile Gebhart
1839 - 1908 (69 years)
Émile Gebhart was a French academic and writer, He was elected to the Académie Française in 1905. He was attacked by Radicals for his religious and patriotic ideals. Life He was the grand-nephew of General Drouot. Having finished his studies in the lycée of Nancy, he was admitted to the École Française of Athens, where he researched future works. When he returned to France he was sent to the lycée of Nice and soon after appointed professor of foreign literature in the University of Nancy.
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Jean de Serres
1540 - 1598 (58 years)
Jean de Serres was a major French historian and an advisor to King Henry IV during the Wars of Religion that marred the French Reformation in the second half of the Sixteenth Century. As a refugee from religious persecution, he was educated in Switzerland and became a Calvinist pastor, humanist, poet, polemicist, and diplomat. His complete translation of Plato appeared in the famous 1578 edition published by Henri Estienne, which is the source of the standard 'Stephanus numbers' still used by scholars to refer to Plato's works. In 1596, de Serres was appointed 'Historian of France' by King Henry IV.
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Niels Krag
1568 - 1602 (34 years)
Niels Krag , was a Danish academic and diplomat. Krag was a Doctor of Divinity, Professor at the University of Copenhagen, and historiographer Royal. Mission to Scotland In August 1589 the Danish council decided that Peder Munk, Breide Rantzau, Dr Paul Knibbe, and Niels Krag would accompany Anne of Denmark, the bride of James VI, to Scotland. After several mishaps, poor weather, and "contrary winds" they decided to stay at Oslo over the winter.
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Stanisław Zakrzewski
1873 - 1936 (63 years)
Stanisław Zakrzewski was a Polish historian. He was a professor of Lviv University , member of Polish Academy of Learning , chairman of Polish Historical Society , senator from Non-partisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government . Zakrzewski was associated with National Democracy, then with Józef Piłsudski.
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Aage Skavlan
1847 - 1920 (73 years)
Aage Gerhard Skavlan was a Norwegian historian. He was born in Herøy as a son of dean Aage Schavland and his wife Gerhardine Pauline Bergh . He was a great-grandnephew of vicar Jacob Schavland, nephew of vicar Gerhard B. Bergh and a brother of Sigvald Skavlan, Einar Skavlan, Sr., Olaf Skavlan and Harald Skavlan.
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Elizabeth Hamer Kegan
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Elizabeth "Betty" Edwards Hamer Kegan was an American archivist and librarian, and served as the Assistant Librarian of Congress from 1963 to 1978. She was a founding member of the Society of American Archivists in 1936 and was President of SAA from 1975-1976.
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Paul Petit
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Paul Petit was a 20th-century French historian, a specialist in ancient Rome. He was a professor at the University of Grenoble. Paul Petit's books covered a multitude of issues in relation to Rome and the , For example, in his book Histoire générale de l'Empire romain, pages 178–179, he dealt with the Cursus honorum of a senator's son.
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Jean Meuvret
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Jean Meuvret was a historian of early modern France. He was a tutor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and was known in Europe and America for his pioneering studies of the French economy in the seventeenth century. His most important work, Le problème des subsistances á l'époque de Louis XIV, examines the corn economy of France during the Old Regime. Meuvret was interested in showing how historical conditions affected different networks of exchange in an early monetary economy.
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Fotios Malleros
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
Fotios Malleros Kasimatis was a Greek historian, philologist and scholar specialist in Byzantinology. His academic career was mainly developed in Chile. Biography He studied at University of Athens, graduating there as a philologist and historian. Juan Gómez Millas, a Chilean politician then Universidad de Chile Faculty of Philosophy and Letters Dean, arrived his country in 1947. Initially he taught there, at the Pedagogical Institute, teaching courses on Greek language, history and literature. Although in Chile there was already, since colonial times, a remarkable academic dedication around ...
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Kristen Valkner
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Kristen Nikolai Valkner was a Norwegian priest and church historian. He was born in Bergen, and graduated with the cand.theol. degree in 1927. He was appointed vicar in Skånevik in 1928, but returned to academia as he became docent in church history at the University of Oslo in 1946. He was promoted to professor in 1964, and retired in 1972. Notable books include Norges kirkehistorie 1500–1800 , Mesteren fra Møre and Kirkestriden i Norge. Belyst ved Lyder Bruns brev til F. C. Krarup 1905–1931 .
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John Gregg
1873 - 1961 (88 years)
John Allen Fitzgerald Gregg CH was a Church of Ireland clergyman, from 1915 Bishop of Ossory, Ferns and Leighlin, in 1920 translated to become Archbishop of Dublin, and finally from 1939 until 1959 Archbishop of Armagh. He was also a theologian and historian.
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Franciscus Haraeus
1555 - 1631 (76 years)
Franciscus Haraeus , , was a theologian, historian, and cartographer from the Low Countries. He is best known for his history of the origins of the Dutch Revolt, written from a Catholic perspective but without polemical bias. He was one of the first cartographers to make thematic maps and globes.
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Theodore S. Parvin
1817 - 1901 (84 years)
Theodore Sutton Parvin was born on the 15th of January, 1817, in Cumberland County, New Jersey. In 1833 he graduated at Woodworth College, Ohio, and began the study of law, graduating at the Cincinnati Law School in 1837. In 1838 Robert Lucas, who had been appointed Governor of the new Territory of Iowa, selected Mr. Parvin for his private secretary. He accompanied the Governor to Burlington where he was appointed to take charge of the Territorial library. In 1839 Mr. Parvin was appointed District Attorney of the middle District and removed to Bloomington. He served three terms as probate judge.
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António Garcia Ribeiro de Vasconcelos
1860 - 1941 (81 years)
António Garcia Ribeiro de Vasconcelos was a Portuguese historian and theologian. He taught at the University of Coimbra from 1887 to 1930, first in the Faculty of Theology and then in the Faculty of Letters, which appointed him Emeritus Professor. In 1936 he became the first president of the Portuguese Academy of History.
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Heinrich Liebmann
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Karl Otto Heinrich Liebmann was a German mathematician and geometer. Life Liebmann was the son of Otto Liebmann , a Jewish neo-Kantian philosophy professor in Jena. Heinrich studied from 1895 to 1897 at the universities Leipzig, Jena and Göttingen. In 1895 he was awarded the doctorate under Carl Johannes Thomae with the subject Die einzweideutigen projektiven Punktverwandtschaften der Ebene and passed the Lehramtsprüfung in 1896. In 1897 he was an assistant in Göttingen and in 1898 in Leipzig, where he was habilitated on the subject Über die Verbiegung der geschlossenen Flächen positiver Krümmung.
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Gloria Griffen Cline
1929 - 1973 (44 years)
Gloria Griffen Cline was an American historian of the Great Basin and professor at Sacramento State College. Biography She was born in San Francisco to parents Robert A. and Grace G. Griffen. In 1931 the Griffens moved to Reno, Nevada, where Gloria attended local grammar schools and Reno High School, graduating in 1947. She received her BA and MA in history from the University of Nevada in 1951, before going on to complete her Ph.D. in history at the University of California in 1958. She adapted her dissertation into the book Exploring the Great Basin .
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Peter Friedrich Arpe
1682 - 1740 (58 years)
Peter Friedrich Arpe was a German lawyer, historian and legal writer. He was also the founder of a huge collection of objects and manuscripts on the history of Schleswig-Holstein, though his collection also included banned theological works. He also wrote and collected under the Latinised form of his name, Petrus Fridericus Arpius.
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