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,
#7451
Harry Carman
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
Harry Carman was an American historian. Having attended Syracuse University followed by studies at Columbia, he became a professor at the latter, and served from 1943 to 1950 he served as its dean. During his tenure as Dean, Carman was a strong supporter of the college within the university, particularly of its Core Curriculum. One of his most notable students was Jacques Barzun. Noted Historian and famous author of Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Reinhard H. Luthin, Fulbright Scholar and Columbia Professor, collaborated with Dean Carman to create "Lincoln and the Patronage".
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Marion Thompson Wright
1904 - 1962 (58 years)
Marion Thompson Wright was an African-American scholar and activist. In 1940, Wright became the first African-American woman in the United States to earn her Ph.D. in history. Early life Marion Manola Thompson Wright was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on September 12, 1902, to Minnie Thompson and Moses R. Thompson. Wright was the youngest of four children, and had two older twin sisters and a brother who died at a young age.
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Thomas Perkins Abernethy
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Thomas Perkins Abernethy was an American historian and academic. He served as a professor of early American history at a number of universities throughout the South and Southwest United States. He mainly taught early American colonial history that concentrated on southern states, their notable figures, frontier life, the move westward, and how it impacted the social, economic and political fabric of colonial America and its transition into an independent nation.
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Alfred Whitney Griswold
1906 - 1963 (57 years)
Alfred Whitney Griswold was an American historian and educator. He served as 16th president of Yale University from 1951 to 1963, during which he built much of Yale's modern scientific research infrastructure, especially on Science Hill.
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David Harris Willson
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
David Harris Willson was an American historian and professor who specialized in the history of 17th-century England. Early life and education Willson's progenitors bearing the Willson name first arrived from England in 1638, settling in Dedham, Massachusetts. Another English progenitor, John Harris, Sr., founded Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. David Harris Willson's parents were Thomas Harris Willson and Amelia Shryrock Willson. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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Leonard Woods Labaree
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Leonard W. Labaree was a distinguished documentary editor, a professor of history at Yale University for more than forty years, a historian of Colonial America, and the founding editor of the multivolume publication of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin.
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Gerald S. Graham
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Gerald Sandford Graham was Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London from 1949 until his retirement in 1970. He earned a world reputation for his series of in-depth studies of the interrelationship between sea power and the development of the British empire.
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Reinhard H. Luthin
1905 - 1962 (57 years)
Reinhard Henry Luthin was a historian best known for his contribution to the study of President Abraham Lincoln. He was a professor of history at Columbia University, with a lifelong interest in facts regarding Lincoln's life and times.
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J. M. Wallace-Hadrill
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, was a British academic and one of the foremost historians of the early Merovingian period. Life and career Wallace-Hadrill was born on 29 September 1916 in Bromsgrove, where his father was a master at Bromsgrove School. He was Professor of Mediaeval History at the University of Manchester between 1955 and 1961. He then became a Senior Research Fellow of Merton College in the University of Oxford from 1961 till 1974. He was Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1974 to 1983 and, between 1974 and 1985, a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
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Selig Perlman
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Selig Perlman was an economist and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Background Perlman was born in Białystok in Congress Poland in 1888. His father, Mordecai, was a Jewish merchant who supplied yarn and thread to home weavers and was a friend of Maxim Litvinov's father.
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William Croft Dickinson
1897 - 1963 (66 years)
William Croft Dickinson, CBE MC was a leading expert in the history of early modern Scotland and a writer of both children's fiction and adult ghost stories. Dickinson held the Chair of Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh from 1943 to 1963.
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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.
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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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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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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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William B. Willcox
1907 - 1985 (78 years)
William Bradford Willcox was an American historian. He was born in Ithaca, New York. He died in North Haven, Connecticut. Education: He received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1928 and studied at Cambridge University. At Yale University he studied architecture , and Tudor-Stuart English history . Wallace Notestein directed his dissertation, which was recognized as a pioneer study of government in Gloucestershire. The work received the distinguished John Addison Porter Prize for best work of scholarship in a given year.
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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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C. Bradford Welles
1901 - 1969 (68 years)
C. Bradford Welles was an American Classicist and ancient historian, born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. His academic career was at Yale University. He received a B.A. in 1924, a Ph.D. in 1928, became an instructor in 1927, an assistant professor in 1931, an associate professor in 1939 and professor in 1940. At his death he was professor of ancient history and curator of the Yale Collection of Papyri. He was profoundly influenced by the great ancient historian Michael I. Rostovtzeff, who arrived at Yale in 1925.
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Henri Daniel-Rops
1901 - 1965 (64 years)
Henri Jules Charles Petiot , known by the pen name Henri Daniel-Rops, was a French Roman Catholic writer and historian. Biography Daniel-Rops was the son of a military officer. He was a student at the Faculties of Law and Literature in Grenoble, receiving his Agrégation in History in 1922 at the age of 21, the youngest in France. He was a professor of history in Chambéry, then in Amiens and finally in Paris. In the late 1920s he began his literary career with an essay, Notre inquiétude , a novel, L'âme obscure , and several articles in journals such as Correspondent, Notre Temps and La Revue d...
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Leo Gershoy
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
Leo Gershoy was a history professor at New York University from 1940 to 1975. In his name the American Historical Association awards an annual prize for the best new book on 17th- or 18th-century European history. An annual lecture at New York University is also named for him.
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Samuel Wide
1861 - 1918 (57 years)
Samuel Karl Anders Wide was a Swedish classical archaeologist, ancient historian and philologist. Biography Wide was born at Stora Tuna in Kopparberg County, Sweden. Wide became a student at Uppsala University in 1879. In 1888 he received his PhD in Greek language and literature from Uppsala University.
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Nicolas Eugène Géruzez
1799 - 1865 (66 years)
Nicolas Eugène Géruzez , was a French critic. He was born at Reims. He was assistant professor at the Sorbonne, and in 1852 he became secretary to the faculty of literature. His works include a Histoire de l'éloquence politique et religieuse en France aux XIV', XV' et XVI' siècles ; an Histoire de la littérature française depuis les origines jusqu’a la Revolution , which he supplemented in 1859 by a volume bringing down the history to the close of the revolutionary period; and some miscellaneous works.
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Kuno Francke
1855 - 1930 (75 years)
Kuno Francke , was a U.S. educator and historian. Most of his career was spent at Harvard University where he eventually became a professor of history and German culture and curator of the Germanic Museum.
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Kathleen Fitzpatrick
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Kathleen Elizabeth Fitzpatrick was an Australian academic and historian. Biography Fitzpatrick was born in the town of , Victoria in 1905. She was educated at Loreto Convent in South Melbourne and Portland, Presentation Convent in Windsor, and Lauriston Girls' School in Armadale. From there, Fitzpatrick entered the University of Melbourne, enrolling in English, following on from her love of literature in high school. However, the honours program in English did not appeal to her, so she enrolled also in history, studying under Ernest Scott; this second subject would become her favourite afte...
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Troels Frederik Lund
1840 - 1921 (81 years)
Troels Frederik Troels-Lund was a Danish historian. Biography Lund was born in Copenhagen. He was the youngest son of Henrik Ferdinand Lund, Søren Kierkegaard’s Nephew. Henrik Ferdinand was the brother of the naturalist Peter Wilhelm Lund.
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Cyril Edward Cain
1883 - 1963 (80 years)
Cyril Edward Cain was a licensed preacher, university professor, and historian. Early years Cyril Edward Cain was born in the Dead Lake community, near Vancleave in Jackson County, Mississippi on February 1, 1883, and was the eldest son of William Yancey Cain and Sarah Burnettie Fletcher Cain. From age 8 through 16, Cyril Cain received his secondary education in the Red Hill School of Jackson County.
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Ivan Grevs
1860 - 1941 (81 years)
Ivan Mikhailovich Grevs was a Russian historian and one of the founders of the Russian school of medievalism that emphasised the influence of the Roman Empire on the social structure of medieval Europe. He was an advocate of the education of women. Doctor of Sciences in Historical Sciences.
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Simon Kaukhchishvili
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
Simon Kaukhchishvili was a Georgian historian and philologist known for his critical editions of old Georgian chronicles; Doctor of Historical Sciences , Professor , Academician of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences .
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William Hubbard
1621 - 1704 (83 years)
William Hubbard was a New England clergyman and historian, born in Ipswich, England. As a child, he was taken by his parents to New England, where he later graduated from Harvard as one of nine graduates in the first commencement ceremony , was ordained and became assistant minister and afterward pastor of the Congregational church at Ipswich, Massachusetts, a post which he resigned just a year before his death.
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José de Oviedo y Baños
1671 - 1738 (67 years)
José de Oviedo y Baños was a Neogranadine military officer and historian. Career Oviedo entered the military in Caracas at age 18, and became a Knight of the Order of Santiago in 1690. He retired from the army in 1730, having reached the rank of Lieutenant general in 1728.
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Ivan Svanidze
1927 - 1987 (60 years)
Ivan "Dzhonrid" Alexandrovich Svanidze , was a Soviet academic who specialized in agriculture and African Studies. He was the nephew of Joseph Stalin through his first wife, Ketevan Svanidze, and the third husband of Stalin's youngest daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva.
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Walter Anderson
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Walter Arthur Alexander Anderson was a Baltic German ethnologist and numismatist. Life Anderson was born from a Baltic German family in Minsk , but in 1894 moved to Kazan , where his father, Nikolai Anderson , had been appointed as professor for Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Kazan. Anderson's younger brother was the mathematician and economist Oskar Anderson , and his older brother was the astrophysicist Wilhelm Anderson . The turmoil created by the Russian Revolution prompted Anderson and his brother Wilhelm to leave Russia and to move to Tartu in Estonia. While living in Estonia in 1939, Anderson, like the majority of Baltic Germans living there, was resettled to Germany.
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Stefan Maria Kuczyński
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Stefan Maria Kuczyński, pen name Włodzimierz Bart , was a Polish historian and academic specializing in the medieval history of the Kingdom of Poland during the Piast dynasty and the Jagiellon dynasty, especially in the period of King Władysław II Jagiełło. After World War II he served as docent at the Uniwersytet Jagielloński , then associate professor of Uniwersytet Wrocławski , followed by professor of Uniwersytet Łódzki , and professor of Uniwersytet Śląski . Kuczyński also served as editor-in-chief of illustrated monthly Śląsk in 1946–1948, published in Jelenia Góra, and the scientific jo...
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Adolphe Rome
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Adolphe Rome was a Belgian classical philologist and science historian who was particularly concerned with the ancient history of astronomy. Education and career Adolphe Rome studied at the Atheneum in Mechelen, where his father Eugène Rome was a teacher of ancient languages. After graduating from the Atheneum, he entered the Catholic seminary in Mechelen and in 1912 was ordained a priest. He then studied classical philology at the University of Louvain and received there, after an interruption of his studies by WWI, his doctorate in 1919. He then worked as a teacher in Schaerbeek and Nivelles and in 1922 received a scholarship at the Institut historique belge de Rome in Rome.
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Mary Sheldon Barnes
1850 - 1898 (48 years)
Mary Downing Sheldon Barnes was an American educator and historian. Her teaching style and publications were considered ahead of their time. She used a method that encouraged students to develop their own research skills utilizing primary sources and their own problem solving skills. Sheldon was teacher of and major influence on author and socialist Anna Strunsky.
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Jacob Caro
1835 - 1904 (69 years)
Jacob Caro was a German historian. Caro was born in Gnesen , Grand Duchy of Posen, the son of Joseph Chayyim Caro. After several years of study at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig, he attracted considerable attention by his work Das Interregnum Polens im Jahr 1586, oder die Häuser Zborowski und Zamojski and was immediately entrusted with the continuation of Röppel's history of Poland in the series of Geschichten der Europäischen Staaten, edited by Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren and Friedrich August Ukert, and published at Gotha. Caro contributed volumes ii through v of this monumental w...
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Ahmad ibn al-Tayyib al-Sarakhsi
833 - 899 (66 years)
Ahmad ibn al-Tayyib al-Sarakhsi was a Persian traveler, historian and philosopher from the city of Sarakhs. He was a pupil of al-Kindi. Al-Sarakhsi was killed by Caliph al-Mu'tadid because, according to an anecdote preserved in Yaqut al-Hamawi's Mu'jam al-Udaba, he had urged the caliph towards apostasy. Al-Biruni reports in his Chronology that al-Sarakhsi had written books in which he denounced prophecy and ridiculed the prophets, whom he styled charlatans. However, Rosenthal has disputed the historicity of the stories that claim al-Sarakhsi was executed for heretical beliefs.
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Sneferu
2700 BC - 2609 BC (91 years)
Sneferu , well known under his Hellenized name Soris , was the founding pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt during the Old Kingdom. Estimates of his reign vary, with for instance The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt suggesting a reign from around 2613 to 2589 BC, a reign of 24 years, while Rolf Krauss suggests a 30-year reign, and Rainer Stadelmann a 48-year reign. He built at least three pyramids that survive to this day and introduced major innovations in the design and construction of pyramids.
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Lajos Blau
1861 - 1936 (75 years)
Lajos Blau was a Jewish–Hungarian scholar of philosophy and Oriental studies, professor of Jewish studies, and publicist born at Putnok, in the Kingdom of Hungary. Biography Blau was educated at three different yeshivot in the Kingdom of Hungary, among them that of Presburg. In 1880–1888, he was a student at the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest . At the same time, he studied philosophy and Oriental studies at the University of Budapest, where he earned a Ph.D. degree cum laude in 1887, and the diploma at the Rabbinical Seminary in 1888.
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Randolph Greenfield Adams
1892 - 1951 (59 years)
Randolph Greenfield Adams was an American librarian and historian, director of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for 28 years. Background Adams was born in Philadelphia to John Stokes Adams, a lawyer and writer, and Heloise Zelina Root Adams. Adams later wrote "My father was the son of a Kentucky judge who married a Philadelphia Quaker; my mother was the daughter of a Connecticut Puritan who married a girl who was mostly French. "
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Esther Clark Wright
1895 - 1990 (95 years)
Esther Isabelle Clark Wright, was a notable Atlantic Canadian historian who at the end of her life received the Order of Canada for her lifetime contributions to Canadian scholarship. She published many works in relation to her historic and genealogical research and was best known for her pioneer and genealogy studies of Nova Scotia & New Brunswick, Canada.
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Kurt Vogel
1888 - 1985 (97 years)
Kurt Vogel was a German historian of mathematics. Life and Work Vogel was born in Altdorf bei Nürnberg and attended school in Ansbach. From 1907 to 1911, he studied mathematics and physics with Max Noether, Paul Gordan, and Erhard Schmidt in Erlangen, and with Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Otto Toeplitz in Göttingen. He passed his examination to become a schoolteacher in 1911, then served as an army officer from 1913 to 1920 before taking a teaching post in Munich.
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Auguste Himly
1823 - 1906 (83 years)
Auguste Louis Himly was a French historian and geographer. After studying in his native town and taking the university course in Berlin , Himly went to Paris and passed first in the examination for fellowship of the lycées , first in the examinations on leaving the École des Chartes, and first in the examination for fellowship of the faculties . In 1849 he took the degree of doctor of letters with two theses, one of which, Wala et Louis le Débonnaire , placed him in the front rank of French scholars in the province of Carolingian history.
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Conrad Henry Moehlman
1879 - 1961 (82 years)
Conrad Henry Moehlman was an American professor of church history at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, where he was emeritus professor. A Baptist and known as theologically liberal, he was a strong proponent of the separation of church and state and wrote a number of books on religion and education, church history, and Christianity.
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Dmitry Petrushevsky
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Dmitry Moiseevich Petrushevsky was a Russian and Soviet historian, medievalist, Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences . His father was a priest in the village. He graduated from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 1886.
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Engelbert Mühlbacher
1843 - 1903 (60 years)
Engelbert Mühlbacher was an Austrian historian. Born in Gresten, he received his classical education in Linz, Upper Austria being his family's home region. In 1862 he became a novice among the Austin Canons in Sankt Florian. After completing his theological studies there, he was ordained priest in 1867. As Alfred Ritter von Arneth relates in his memoirs, historical studies had been successfully cultivated at St. Florian's since Provost Arneth's time, and Mühlbacher was soon active in this domain. Among his writings are articles on St. Florian's Gerhoh von Reichersberg, and the literary productions of St.
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Bernhard Erdmannsdörffer
1833 - 1901 (68 years)
Bernhard Erdmannsdörffer was a German historian. He was the father of mineralogist Otto Erdmannsdörffer. From 1852 he studied classical philology and history at the University of Jena, subsequently receiving his doctorate under the sponsorship of Johann Gustav Droysen. After conducting research in Italy, he relocated to Berlin in 1861 and collaborated with Droysen and Maximilian Wolfgang Duncker on a massive work involving Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, "Urkunden und Actenstücke zur Geschichte des Kurfürsten Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg", a project that ultimately grew to 23 ...
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