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,
#7451
Michael Karpovich
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Mikhail Mikhailovich Karpovich , known in English as Michael Karpovich, was a Russian and American historian of Russia and one of the fathers of Slavic studies in the United States. Biography Early years Mikhail Mikhailovich Karpovich was born August 3, 1888, in Tbilisi, in the Russian Empire . He was of mixed Russian, Polish, and Georgian ancestry. He became active in the Socialist Revolutionary Party from 1904 to 1907; he was arrested and held briefly in December 1905, then arrested again and held for a month before being released without having been brought to trial. As a condition of his release he was forbidden from living further in Georgia.
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Bahadur Shah Zafar
1775 - 1862 (87 years)
Bahadur Shah II , usually referred to by his poetic title Bahadur Shah Zafar , was the twentieth and last Mughal emperor and an Urdu poet. He was the second son and the successor to his father, Akbar II, who died in 1837. He was a titular Emperor, as the Mughal Empire existed in name only and his authority was limited only to the walled city of Old Delhi . Following his involvement in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British deposed him and exiled him to Rangoon in British-controlled Burma in 1858, after convicting him on several charges. The title of Empress of India was subsequently transfe...
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Lev Kamenev
1883 - 1936 (53 years)
Lev Borisovich Kamenev was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. Born in Moscow to parents who were both involved in revolutionary politics, Kamenev attended Imperial Moscow University before becoming a revolutionary himself, joining the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901 and was active in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Tiflis . He participated in the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. Relocating abroad in 1908, Kamenev became an early member of the Bolsheviks and a close associate of the exiled Vladimir Lenin. In 1914, he was arrested upon returning to St. Petersburg and exiled to Siberia.
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Ludwig Riess
1861 - 1928 (67 years)
Ludwig Riess was a German-born historian and educator, noted for his work in late 19th century Japan. Biography Riess was born in Deutsch-Krone, Prussia , as the youngest of five children in a German Jewish family. He was proficient in mathematics and physics as a child, and encouraged by his family to become an engineer or architect. However, he was more interested in world history, and chose to pursue an academic career over their wishes and studied at the University of Berlin under the renowned historian, Leopold von Ranke.
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Jiaqing Emperor
1760 - 1820 (60 years)
The Jiaqing Emperor , also known by his temple name Emperor Renzong of Qing, personal name Yongyan, was the sixth emperor of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty, and the fifth Qing emperor to rule over China proper, from 1796 to 1820. He was the 15th son of the Qianlong Emperor. During his reign, he prosecuted Heshen, the corrupt Manchu favorite of his father, and attempted to restore order within the Qing Empire while curbing the smuggling of opium into China.
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Ban Gu
32 - 92 (60 years)
Ban Gu was a Chinese historian, poet, and politician best known for his part in compiling the Book of Han, the second of China's 24 dynastic histories. He also wrote a number of fu, a major literary form, part prose and part poetry, which is particularly associated with the Han era. A number of Ban's fu were collected by Xiao Tong in the Wen Xuan.
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Georges Lefebvre
1874 - 1959 (85 years)
Georges Lefebvre was a French historian, best known for his work on the French Revolution and peasant life. He is considered one of the pioneers of "history from below". He coined the phrase the "death certificate of the old order" to describe the Great Fear of 1789. Among his most significant works was the 1924 book Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française , which was the result of 20 years of research into the role of the peasantry during the revolutionary period.
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Edward Everett Hale
1822 - 1909 (87 years)
Edward Everett Hale was an American author, historian, and Unitarian minister, best known for his writings such as "The Man Without a Country", published in Atlantic Monthly, in support of the Union during the Civil War. He was the grand-nephew of Nathan Hale, the American spy during the Revolutionary War.
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William of Tyre
1130 - 1186 (56 years)
William of Tyre was a medieval prelate and chronicler. As archbishop of Tyre, he is sometimes known as William II to distinguish him from his predecessor, William I, the Englishman, a former prior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, who was Archbishop of Tyre from 1127 to 1135. He grew up in Jerusalem at the height of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which had been established in 1099 after the First Crusade, and he spent twenty years studying the liberal arts and canon law in the universities of Europe.
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Gabriel Monod
1844 - 1912 (68 years)
Gabriel Monod was a French historian, the nephew of Adolphe Monod. Biography Born in Ingouville, Seine-Maritime, he was educated at Le Havre then went to Paris to complete his education, lodging with the de Pressensé family. The influence of Edmond de Pressensé, a pastor and large-minded theologian, and of Madame de Pressensé, a woman of superior intellect and refined feeling, who devoted her life to educational works and charity, made a great impression on him. In 1865 he left the École normale supérieure, and went to Germany, where he studied at the University of Göttingen and Humboldt University in Berlin.
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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
1834 - 1902 (68 years)
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, , better known as Lord Acton, was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer. He is best remembered for the remark he wrote in a letter to an Anglican bishop in 1887: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
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Gallus Anonymus
1066 - 1145 (79 years)
Gallus Anonymus, also known by his Polonized variant Gall , is the name traditionally given to the anonymous author of , composed in Latin between 1112 and 1118. Gallus is generally regarded as the first historian to have described the history of Poland. His Chronicles are an obligatory text for university courses in Polish history. Very little is known of the author himself and it is widely believed that he was a foreigner.
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Henry of Huntingdon
1080 - 1160 (80 years)
Henry of Huntingdon , the son of a canon in the diocese of Lincoln, was a 12th-century English historian and the author of Historia Anglorum , as "the most important Anglo-Norman historian to emerge from the secular clergy". He served as archdeacon of Huntingdon. The few details of Henry's life that are known originated from his own works and from a number of official records. He was brought up in the wealthy court of Robert Bloet of Lincoln, who became his patron.
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Heinrich Graetz
1817 - 1891 (74 years)
Heinrich Graetz was amongst the first historians to write a comprehensive history of the Jewish people from a Jewish perspective. Born Tzvi Hirsch Graetz to a butcher family in Xions , Grand Duchy of Posen, in Prussia , he attended Breslau University, but since Jews at that time were barred from receiving Ph.D.s there, he obtained his doctorate from the University of Jena. After 1845 he was principal of the Jewish Orthodox school of the Breslau community, and later taught history at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau .
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Ahmose I
1560 BC - 1525 BC (35 years)
Ahmose I was a pharaoh and founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, classified as the first dynasty of the New Kingdom of Egypt, the era in which ancient Egypt achieved the peak of its power. He was a member of the Theban royal house, the son of pharaoh Seqenenre Tao and brother of the last pharaoh of the Seventeenth dynasty, Kamose. During the reign of his father or grandfather, Thebes rebelled against the Hyksos, the rulers of Lower Egypt. When he was seven years old, his father was killed, and he was about ten when his brother died of unknown causes after reigning only three years. Ahmo...
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Charles McLean Andrews
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
Charles McLean Andrews was an American historian, an authority on American colonial history. He wrote 102 major scholarly articles and books, as well as over 360 book reviews, newspaper articles, and short items. He is especially known as a leader of the "Imperial school" of historians who studied, and generally admired, the efficiency of the British Empire in the 18th century. Kross argues:His intangible legacy is twofold. First is his insistence that all history be based on facts and that the evidence be found, organized, and weighed. Second is his injunction that colonial America can ne...
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Sabuktigin
942 - 997 (55 years)
Abu Mansur Nasir al-Din Sabuktigin , also spelled as Sabuktagin, Sabuktakin, Sebüktegin and Sebük Tigin, was the founder of the Ghaznavid dynasty, ruling from 367 A.H/977 A.D to 387 A.H/997 A.D. In Turkic the name means beloved prince.
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Thomas Babington Macaulay
1800 - 1859 (59 years)
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, was a British historian and Whig politician, who served as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841, and as the Paymaster General between 1846 and 1848.
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Américo Castro
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Américo Castro Quesada was a Spanish cultural historian, philologist, and literary critic who challenged some of the prevailing notions of Spanish identity, raising controversy with his conclusions that Spaniards did not become the distinct group that they are today until after the Islamic conquest of Hispania of 711, an event that turned them into an Iberian caste co-existing among Moors and Jews, and that the history of Spain and Portugal was adversely affected with the success in the 11th to the 15th centuries of the "Reconquista" or Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula and with t...
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Quintus Curtius Rufus
100 - 50 (-50 years)
Quintus Curtius Rufus was a Roman historian, probably of the 1st century, author of his only known and only surviving work, Historiae Alexandri Magni, "Histories of Alexander the Great", or more fully Historiarum Alexandri Magni Macedonis Libri Qui Supersunt, "All the Books That Survive of the Histories of Alexander the Great of Macedon." Much of it is missing. Apart from his name on the manuscripts, nothing else certain is known of him. This fact alone has led philologists to believe that he had another historical identity, to which, due to the accidents of time, the link has been broken. A few theories exist.
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Alfred Cobban
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Alfred Bert Carter Cobban was an English historian and Professor of French History at University College, London, who along with prominent French historian François Furet advocated a classical liberal view of the French Revolution.
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William Wells Brown
1814 - 1884 (70 years)
William Wells Brown was an American abolitionist, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery near Mount Sterling, Kentucky, Brown escaped to Ohio in 1834 at the age of 19. He settled in Boston, Massachusetts, where he worked for abolitionist causes and became a prolific writer. While working for abolition, Brown also supported causes including: temperance, women's suffrage, pacifism, prison reform, and an anti-tobacco movement. His novel Clotel , considered the first novel written by an African American, was published in London, England, where he resided at the time; it was later ...
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William Archibald Dunning
1857 - 1922 (65 years)
William Archibald Dunning was an American historian and political scientist at Columbia University noted for his work on the Reconstruction era of the United States. He founded the informal Dunning School of interpreting the Reconstruction era through his own writings and the Ph.D. dissertations of his numerous students. Dunning has been criticized for advocating white supremacist interpretations, his "blatant use of the discipline of history for reactionary ends" and for offering "scholarly legitimacy to the disenfranchisement of southern blacks and to the Jim Crow system."
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Friedrich Christoph Schlosser
1776 - 1861 (85 years)
Friedrich Christoph Schlosser was a German historian, Professor of History at the University of Heidelberg and a Privy Councillor in Prussia. Early years He was born at Jever in the District of Friesland. He studied theology, mainly at Göttingen, and then tutored privately. Turning to the study of history, he became and remained for a quarter of a century the most popular German historian.
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Andrew Dickson White
1832 - 1918 (86 years)
Andrew Dickson White was an American historian and educator who cofounded Cornell University and served as its first president for nearly two decades. He was known for expanding the scope of college curricula. A politician, he had served as state senator in New York. He was later appointed as an American diplomat to Germany and Russia, among other responsibilities.
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Sidney Bradshaw Fay
1876 - 1967 (91 years)
Sidney Bradshaw Fay was an American historian whose examination of the causes of World War I, The Origins of the World War , remains a classic study. In this book, which won him the 1928 George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association, Fay argued that Germany was too readily blamed for the war and that a great deal of the responsibility instead rested with the Allies, especially Russia and Serbia. His stance is supported by several modern scholars, such as Christopher Clark, but it remains controversial.
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Béla IV of Hungary
1206 - 1270 (64 years)
Béla IV was King of Hungary and Croatia between 1235 and 1270, and Duke of Styria from 1254 to 1258. As the oldest son of King Andrew II, he was crowned upon the initiative of a group of influential noblemen in his father's lifetime in 1214. His father, who strongly opposed Béla's coronation, refused to give him a province to rule until 1220. In this year, Béla was appointed Duke of Slavonia, also with jurisdiction in Croatia and Dalmatia. Around the same time, Béla married Maria, a daughter of Theodore I Laskaris, Emperor of Nicaea. From 1226, he governed Transylvania as duke. He supported Christian missions among the pagan Cumans who dwelled in the plains to the east of his province.
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Jean-François Marmontel
1723 - 1799 (76 years)
Jean-François Marmontel was a French historian, writer and a member of the Encyclopédistes movement. Biography He was born of poor parents at Bort, Limousin . After studying with the Jesuits at Mauriac, Cantal, he taught in their colleges at Clermont-Ferrand and Toulouse; and in 1745, acting on the advice of Voltaire, he set out for Paris to try for literary success.
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Liutprand of Cremona
922 - 972 (50 years)
Liutprand, also Liudprand, Liuprand, Lioutio, Liucius, Liuzo, and Lioutsios , was a historian, diplomat, and Bishop of Cremona born in northern Italy, whose works are an important source for the politics of the 10th century Byzantine court.
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J. E. Neale
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Sir John Ernest Neale was an English historian who specialised in Elizabethan and Parliamentary history. From 1927 to 1956, he was the Astor Professor of English History at University College London.
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Al-Tabari
839 - 923 (84 years)
, more commonly known as al-Ṭabarī , was a Muslim historian and scholar from Amol, Tabaristan. Among the most prominent figures of the Islamic Golden Age, al-Tabari is known for his historical works and expertise in Qur'anic exegesis , but he has also been described as "an impressively prolific polymath". He wrote works on a diverse range of subjects, including world history, poetry, lexicography, grammar, ethics, mathematics, and medicine.
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J. Franklin Jameson
1859 - 1937 (78 years)
John Franklin Jameson was an American historian, author, and journal editor who played a major role in the professional activities of American historians in the early 20th century. He helped establish the American Historical Association.
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Eileen Power
1889 - 1940 (51 years)
Eileen Edna Le Poer Power was a British economic historian and medievalist. Early life and education Eileen Power was the eldest daughter of a stockbroker and was born at Altrincham, Cheshire in 1889. She was a sister of Rhoda Power, the children's writer and broadcaster, and Beryl Millicent Le Poer Power, a civil servant . When she was three her father, a stockbroker, was arrested for fraud and the family moved to Bournemouth to live with Benson Clegg . After her mother died of tuberculosis when Power was only 14, she moved to Oxford with her two sisters to live with her aunt. Power was edu...
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Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren
1760 - 1842 (82 years)
Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren was a German historian. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History. Biography Heeren was born on 25 October 1760 in Arbergen near Bremen, a small village in which his father was a clergyman. He spent the first 15 years of his life in Arbergen, where he was privately educated. From the beginning of the year 1776, shortly after his father had been appointed Prediger at the cathedral at Bremen, he attended the cathedral school there. At Michelmas 1779 he went on to the university at Göttingen, in accord with his father's wish that he work toward a degree in t...
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Christoph Meiners
1747 - 1810 (63 years)
Christoph Meiners was a German racialist, philosopher, historian, and writer born in Warstade. He supported the polygenist theory of human origins. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History.
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Geoffrey Keating
1569 - 1644 (75 years)
Geoffrey Keating was an Irish historian. He was born in County Tipperary, Ireland, and is buried in Tubrid Graveyard in the parish of Ballylooby-Duhill. He became a Catholic priest and a poet. Biography It was generally believed until recently that Keating had been born in Burgess, County Tipperary; indeed, a monument to Keating was raised beside the bridge at Burgess, in 1990; but Diarmuid Ó Murchadha writes,
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Rasul Jafarian
1343 - Present (683 years)
Rasul Jafarian is an Iranian clergyman and researcher in field of Iranian history. He is currently the Professor of the Department of History at the University of Tehran, the Director of The specialized library on Islam and Iran, and the Director of the Central Library of the University of Tehran. Rasul Jafarian became a permanent member of the Academy of Sciences of Iran in June 2018 with the vote of the members of the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences.
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Ottokar II of Bohemia
1233 - 1278 (45 years)
Ottokar II , the Iron and Golden King, was a member of the Přemyslid dynasty who reigned as King of Bohemia from 1253 until his death in 1278. He also held the titles of Margrave of Moravia from 1247, Duke of Austria from 1251, and Duke of Styria from 1260, as well as Duke of Carinthia and landgrave of Carniola from 1269.
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Gerald of Wales
1146 - 1220 (74 years)
Gerald of Wales was a Cambro-Norman priest and historian. As a royal clerk to the king and two archbishops, he travelled widely and wrote extensively. He studied and taught in France and visited Rome several times, meeting the Pope. He was nominated for several bishoprics but turned them down in the hope of becoming Bishop of St Davids, but was unsuccessful despite considerable support. His final post was as Archdeacon of Brecon, from which he retired to academic study for the remainder of his life. Much of his writing survives.
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Aurelius Victor
320 - 390 (70 years)
Sextus Aurelius Victor was a historian and politician of the Roman Empire. Victor was the author of a short history of imperial Rome, entitled De Caesaribus and covering the period from Augustus to Constantius II. The work was published in 361. Under the emperor Julian , Victor served as governor of Pannonia Secunda; in 389 he became praefectus urbi , senior imperial official in Rome.
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Herbert Gutman
1928 - 1985 (57 years)
Herbert George Gutman was an American professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he wrote on slavery and labor history. Early life and education Gutman was born in 1928 to Jewish immigrant parents in New York City; he was deeply influenced by their leftism. He attended John Adams High School and graduated with a bachelor's degree from Queens College in 1948. During his teens and his college years, Gutman became involved in numerous left-wing and labor causes and worked for the Wallace presidential campaign.
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Charles VI of France
1368 - 1422 (54 years)
Charles VI , nicknamed the Beloved and later the Mad , was King of France from 1380 until his death in 1422. He is known for his mental illness and psychotic episodes that plagued him throughout his life.
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Gilbert Highet
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Gilbert Arthur Highet was a Scottish American classicist, academic writer, intellectual critic, and literary historian. Biography Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Gilbert Highet is best known as a mid-20th-century teacher of the humanities in the United States. He attended Hillhead High School, Glasgow, Glasgow University and, on both a Snell and a Jenkyns Exhibition, Balliol College, Oxford. His Oxford career was distinguished by a First in Classical Moderations, 1930, an Ireland and Craven Scholarship, 1930, the Chancellor's Prize for Latin Verse, 1931, and a First in Literae Humaniores in 1932....
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William Robertson
1721 - 1793 (72 years)
William Robertson FRSE FSA Scot was a Scottish historian, minister in the Church of Scotland, and Principal of the University of Edinburgh. "The thirty years during which [he] presided over the University perhaps represent the highest point in its history." He made significant contributions to the writing of Scottish history and the history of Spain and Spanish America.
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John Morris
1913 - 1977 (64 years)
John Robert Morris was an English historian who specialised in the study of the institutions of the Roman Empire and the history of Sub-Roman Britain. He is best known for his book The Age of Arthur , which attempted to reconstruct the history of Britain and Ireland during the so-called "Dark Ages" following the Roman withdrawal, based on scattered archaeological and historical records. Much of his other work focused on Britain during this time.
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Alexander Vasiliev
1867 - 1953 (86 years)
Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev was considered the foremost authority on Byzantine history and culture in the mid-20th century. His History of the Byzantine Empire remains one of a few comprehensive accounts of the entire Byzantine history, on the par with those authored by Edward Gibbon and Fyodor Uspensky.
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William Ashley
1860 - 1927 (67 years)
Sir William James Ashley was an English economic historian. His major intellectual influence was in organising economic history in Great Britain and introducing the ideas of the leading German economic historians, especially Gustav von Schmoller and the historical school of economic history. His chief work is The Economic Organisation of England, still a set text on many A-level and University syllabuses.
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Edward Channing
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Edward Perkins Channing was an American historian and an author of a monumental History of the United States in six volumes, for which he won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for History. His thorough research in printed sources and judicious judgments made the book a standard reference for scholars for decades. Channing taught at Harvard 1883–1929 and trained many PhD's who became professors at major universities.
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James Harvey Robinson
1863 - 1936 (73 years)
James Harvey Robinson was an American scholar of history who, with Charles Austin Beard, founded New History, a disciplinary approach that attempts to use history to understand contemporary problems, which greatly broadened the scope of historical scholarship in relation to the social sciences.
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Ernest Scott
1867 - 1939 (72 years)
Sir Ernest Scott was an Australian historian and professor of history at the University of Melbourne from 1913 to 1936. Early life Scott was born in Northampton, England, on 21 June 1867, the son of Hannah Scott, a housekeeper; William Scott, civil engineer, was cited as his father when Ernest married. Ernest Scott was educated at St Katherine's Church of England School, Northampton and worked as a journalist on the London Globe. On 7 May 1892 Scott married Mabel Emily Besant, daughter of Rev. Frank and Annie Besant, the theosophist; they had one child, Muriel .
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