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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

Hugh Seton-Watson

1916 - 1984 (68 years)

George Hugh Nicolas Seton-Watson, CBE, FBA was a British historian and political scientist specialising in Russia. Early life Seton-Watson was one of the two sons of Robert William Seton-Watson, the activist and historian. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, graduating in 1938 with First Class Honours in 'Modern Greats' .

#7452

Charles Higounet

1911 - 1988 (77 years)

Charles Higounet was a French historian medievalist, specialising in bastides and the Middle Ages in the south-west of France. Biography Charles Higounet was a French medievalist who taught in Bordeaux III University from 1946 to 1979, where a research center was named after him. He used to be a specialist of bastides and the history of south-west France, and he was especially noticed after his history of Bordeaux, for which he won the historical prize, Grand prix Gobert, in 1973. He also led a team that worked on a historical atlas for French cities. He also wrote a volume of the "Que sais-je?" on various forms of writing.

#7453

Howard Hayes Scullard

1903 - 1983 (80 years)

Howard Hayes Scullard was a British historian specialising in ancient history, notable for editing the Oxford Classical Dictionary and for his many published works. Life and career Scullard's father was Herbert Hayes Scullard, a minister, and his mother Barbara Louisa Dodds.

#7454

Dexter Perkins

1889 - 1984 (95 years)

Dexter Perkins was a historian who served as Professor and Chairman of the Department of American History at the University of Rochester, before leaving for Cornell. Biography Born in Boston, and educated at Boston Latin School, Perkins received his A.B. and PhD from Harvard University, where he was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa. In his doctoral studies, Archibald Cary Coolidge was a formative influence.

#7455

Eric G. Forbes

1933 - 1984 (51 years)

Eric Gray Forbes FRSE FRAS was Professor of the History of Science at the University of Edinburgh. Life He was born in St. Andrews in Fife on 30 March 1933. He went to Madras College in St Andrews University and graduated BSc. He then continued as a postgraduate at St Andrews and the University of London gaining a PhD in Astronomy.

#7456

William Cecil Dampier

1867 - 1952 (85 years)

Sir William Cecil Dampier FRS was a British scientist, agriculturist, and science historian who developed a method of extracting lactose from whey. He was born in London, the son of Charles Langley and Mary Whetham and the grandson of Sir Charles Whetham, a former Lord Mayor of London. In 1886, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge and in 1889 commenced his varied researches in the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1891 was elected a Fellow of Trinity.

#7457

Robert C. Binkley

1897 - 1940 (43 years)

Robert Cedric Binkley was an American historian. As chair of the Joint Committee on Materials for Research of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies in the 1930s he led several projects in the areas of publication using new near-print technologies, microphotography, copyright and archival management, many under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. His theoretical writings on amateur scholarship and the ways non-experts could contribute to scholarship have been influential on recent thinking about digital humanities and web publishing.

#7458

Raymond James Sontag

1897 - 1972 (75 years)

Raymond James Sontag was an American historian of European diplomacy of the 19th and 20th centuries. Life He was born on October 2, 1897. He received his B.S. and M.A. degrees from the University of Illinois in 1920 and 1921, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1924.

#7459

D. P. Walker

1914 - 1985 (71 years)

Daniel Pickering Walker was an English historian and author of several noted studies on the occult in Western history. Life Walker was trained at Oxford. He spent much of his career at the Warburg Institute at the University of London. He was made senior research fellow in 1953, and held the Warburg's Chair in the History of the Classical Tradition from 1975 until his retirement in 1981.

#7460

Julia de Lacy Mann

1891 - 1985 (94 years)

Julia de Lacy Mann was an English economic historian. She was principal of St Hilda's College, Oxford, for 27 years, from 1928 to 1955. Early life and education Julia de Lacy Mann was born in London on 22 August 1891, the daughter of James Saumarez Mann, a classical scholar, and Amy Bowman Mann, the daughter of a classical scholar. Julia's only sibling, James Saumarez Mann, was killed by a sniper in Iraq in 1920.

#7461

Vincent Desborough

1914 - 1978 (64 years)

Vincent Robin d'Arba Desborough, FBA, FSA was an English historian and archaeologist. His is credited with discovering the Greek Dark Ages. Life and career Born on 19 July 1914 at Tunbridge Wells, Desborough's father was Latvian and his mother British. He was schooled in France and Switzerland before attending St Augustine's in Ramsgate and Downside School. He then studied classics at New College, Oxford, from 1932, graduating in the second class in 1936. He completed the BLitt at Oxford under Sir John Myres's supervision. In 1937, he was awarded the Macmillan Studentship by the British Schoo...

#7462

Keith Hancock

1898 - 1988 (90 years)

Sir William Keith Hancock, , also known as W. K. Hancock, was a prominent Australian historian and academic. Hancock was an Anglican and keen admirer of the British Empire. Early life and education He was born in Melbourne, Colony of Victoria, the son of Archdeacon William Hancock. At the age of nine, he won the Royal Humane Society's medal for rescuing another child from drowning in the Mitchell River. He was educated at Melbourne Grammar School and later the University of Melbourne where he was resident at Trinity College from 1917, winning the Perry Scholarship, Trinity's most prestigious award.

#7463

Arthur McCandless Wilson

1902 - 1979 (77 years)

Arthur McCandless Wilson was a professor of biography and government. He is known primarily for his two-volume biography of Diderot. Wilson graduated in 1922 with A.B. from South Dakota's Yankton College. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1926 with B.A., in 1927 with B. Litt., and in 1931 with M.A. . He married Julia Mary Tolford in 1927. At Harvard University he graduated with M.A. in 1930 and Ph.D. in 1933. In Dartmouth College's department of biography, he was appointed in 1933 instructor, in 1936 assistant professor, and in 1940 full professor, retiring in 1967 as professor emeritus.

#7464

Ralph Pugh

1910 - 1982 (72 years)

Ralph Bernard Pugh was an historian and editor of the Victoria History of the Counties of England from 1949 to 1977. He was also a professor of English history at the University of London, a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, a teacher of palaeography, and an expert on medieval penology.

#7465

Mary Flug Handlin

1913 - 1976 (63 years)

Mary Flug Handlin was an American historian who was the editor of the Harvard University Center for the Study of the History of Liberty in America from 1958 to 1976. She co-authored six books on U.S. politics and society with her husband, Oscar Handlin.

#7466

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.

#7467

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.

#7468

Reinhard H. Luthin

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.

#7469

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.

#7470

Koppel Pinson

1904 - 1961 (57 years)

Koppel Shub Pinson was a historian who specialized in the origins of German nationalism. Early life Born in Postawy, Russian Empire , on February 11, 1904, Pinson immigrated to the United States with his family in 1907.

#7471

Warren Ault

1887 - 1989 (102 years)

Warren Ortman Ault was an American historian, who taught at Boston University from 1913 to 1957. Life Ault graduated from Baker University in 1907, before studying at Jesus College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. While a student at Baker, he was a member of the local Zeta Chi fraternity. He then obtained a doctorate from Yale University in 1919, having served as a second lieutenant in the artillery in the First World War. He taught history at Boston University from 1913 to 1957, becoming William Edwards Huntington professor. He became an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford in 1971. He wa...

#7472

Jaume Vicens i Vives

Jaume Vicens i Vives

1910 - 1960 (50 years)

Jaume Vicens Vives was a Spanish historian, and is considered one of the top influential Catalan historians of the 20th century. Biography Childhood He was the son of Juan Vicens Comas and Victoria Vives and was born on the Santa Eugenia road, number 5, in Girona. His father had arrived in Girona at the end of the 19th century and worked as a proxy in the factory La Farinera Ensesa. His mother had a dressmaker's shop in the Plaça del Gra. His parents had two sons and a daughter: Juan, born in 1906; Jaime, in 1910 and María del Carmen in 1923.

#7473

Edwin Lieuwen

1923 - 1988 (65 years)

Edwin Lieuwen was an American historian, professor, and author. His area of expertise was focused on Latin America. His work was a major precursor to the establishing of the Latin American Institute.

#7474

Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer

1864 - 1936 (72 years)

Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer was a Swiss folklorist, Germanist and medievalist, from 1900 professor for phonetics, Swiss dialectology and folklore at the University of Basle and founder of the Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde in 1896. His 1902 essay Die Volkskunde als Wissenschaft received international attention.

#7475

Goronwy Edwards

1891 - 1976 (85 years)

Sir John Goronwy Edwards was a Welsh historian. Early life Edwards, who was proficient in Welsh before he could read English, was educated at Holywell Grammar School before matriculating at Jesus College, Oxford in 1909. His 1913 essay on Danby gained him proxime accessit in the Stanhope prize competition.

#7476

John Le Patourel

1909 - 1981 (72 years)

John Herbert Le Patourel was a British medieval historian and professor at the University of Leeds. Biography Le Patourel was born on 29 July 1909 in Guernsey, where his father, Herbert Augustus Le Patourel, was the procureur from 1929 to 1934. He was educated at Elizabeth College, Guernsey and Jesus College, Oxford where he obtained a BA in Modern History in 1931 followed by a DPhil. In 1939 he married Jean Bird , who became an expert in medieval ceramics and was a Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Leeds from 1967 to 1980. They had a daughter and three sons. His brother, Herbe...

#7477

Nora K. Chadwick

1891 - 1972 (81 years)

Nora Kershaw Chadwick CBE FSA FBA was an English philologist who specialized in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Old Norse studies. Early life and education Nora Kershaw was born in Lancashire in 1891, the first daughter of James Kershaw and Emma Clara Booth, married in 1888. Nora's sister Mabel, born in 1895, converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun.

#7478

LeRoy R. Hafen

1893 - 1985 (92 years)

LeRoy Reuben Hafen was a historian of the American West and a Latter-day Saint. For many years he was a professor of history at Brigham Young University . Biography He was born on December 8, 1893, in Bunkerville, Nevada to John George Hafen, a polygamist, and Mary Ann Stucki. He attended high school in Cedar City, Utah for two years and then at the St. George Stake Academy in St. George, Utah. It was in St. George that Hafen met his wife, Ann Woodbury. They were married on 3 September 1915 in the St. George Temple. He received his bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University. After this he taught school in Bunkerville and then was the principal of Virgin Valley High School.

#7479

Earl Lewis

1900 - Present (125 years)

Earl Lewis is the founding director of the Center for Social Solutions and professor of history at the University of Michigan. He was president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 2013 to 2018. Before his appointment as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Lewis served for over eight years as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and as the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and African American Studies at Emory University. He was the university's first African-American provost and at the time the highest-ranking African-American administrator in the...

#7480

Władysław Czapliński

1905 - 1981 (76 years)

Władysław Czapliński was a Polish historian, a professor of the University of Wrocław, author of many popular books about Polish history. He finished his studies at the Jagiellonian University in 1927 in the Second Polish Republic, and for the next several years he was a teacher of history. During the Second World War he took part in the underground education in Poland during World War II. After the war he moved to Wrocław, where he worked at the local university until his retirement in 1975.

#7481

Charles Farwell Edson Jr.

1905 - 1988 (83 years)

Charles Farwell Edson Jr. was an American scholar of Ancient History. Edson was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1905 as the son of poet and musician Charles Farwell Edson and social activist and feminist Katherine Philips Edson, and the great nephew of prominent Chicago businessman John V. Farwell and Senator Charles B. Farwell. Edson received the degree of A.B. in Classics from Stanford University in 1929 . He went on to earn his Ph.D. in History at Harvard University in 1939 with a dissertation entitled “Five Studies in Macedonian History" directed by Professor William Scott Ferguson . ...

#7482

Johannes Tropfke

Johannes Tropfke

1866 - 1939 (73 years)

Johannes Tropfke was a German mathematician and teacher, who is best remembered for his influential work on the history of mathematics Geschichte der Elementarmathematik, which consists of seven volumes.

#7483

Philip Wayne Powell

1913 - 1987 (74 years)

Philip Wayne Powell was an American historian specializing in the Spanish colonial history of the American Southwest. He was born in Chino, California, attended Occidental College and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his B.A. in 1936. He undertook graduate studies at Berkeley, taking Hispanic studies with Herbert I. Priestley and Herbert E. Bolton. Powell completed his Ph.D. in 1941, and joined the Army.

#7484

Alfons Dopsch

1868 - 1953 (85 years)

Alfons Dopsch was an Austrian social and economic historian who specialised in the history of medieval Europe. He studied at Institut fur Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung and was a professor at the University of Vienna from 1898 to 1936.

#7485

Hermann Strasburger

1909 - 1985 (76 years)

Hermann Strasburger was a German ancient historian. He was the son of the internist Julius Strasburger and grandson of the botanist Eduard Strasburger.

#7486

John F. Benton

1931 - 1988 (57 years)

John F. Benton was the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. Education He graduated from Haverford College, with a BA in 1953, from Princeton University with an MA in 1955, and PhD in 1959. He taught at Reed College and the University of Pennsylvania.

#7487

James Pounder Whitney

1857 - 1939 (82 years)

James Pounder Whitney was a British ecclesiastical historian. Educated at King James's Grammar School, Almondbury and Owens College, Manchester, he was a foundation scholar at King's College, Cambridge, gaining firsts in the mathematics and history triposes in 1881. A fellow of King's College, he was ordained an Anglican priest in 1895. After various clerical and teaching appointment, he was professor of ecclesiastical history at King's College London from 1908 to 1918. He was Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge from 1919 to 1939. He was joint editor of Th...

#7488

Hubert Jedin

1900 - 1980 (80 years)

Hubert Jedin was a Catholic Church historian from Germany, whose publications specialized on the history of ecumenical councils in general and the Council of Trent in particular, on which he published a 2400-page history over the years 1951–1975.

#7489

John Duncan Mackie

1887 - 1978 (91 years)

John Duncan Mackie CBE MC was a distinguished Scottish historian who wrote a one-volume history of Scotland and several works on early modern Scotland. Biography Born in Edinburgh, Mackie was educated at Middlesbrough High School and Jesus College, Oxford, where he took a first-class degree in history and won the Lothian Essay Prize. He was appointed as a lecturer in history at the University of St Andrews in 1909, aged 22. While at the university he introduced the subject of Scottish history into the curriculum.

#7490

Eugene C. Barker

Eugene C. Barker

1874 - 1956 (82 years)

Eugene Campbell Barker was an American historian at the University of Texas, the managing director of the Texas State Historical Association, and the editor of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. He chaired the history department while soliciting gifts to the university, which he used to build a collection of archives and artifacts. In 1950, the university dedicated the Eugene C. Barker History Center as a repository for his collections. These collections are an important part of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas.

#7491

Heinz Politzer

1910 - 1978 (68 years)

Heinz Politzer was an internationally recognized academic and writer. As a young man he was forced to flee Nazism first to Palestine and then to the United States, where he taught German language and literature as a professor at the Bryn Mawr College, Oberlin College, and the University of California, Berkeley. He was a literary scholar, published poet, and prominent editor, particularly of Franz Kafka. As a close associate of Kafka's protégé, Max Brod, Politzer coedited with Brod the first complete collection of Kafka's works in eight volumes, published initially by the Schocken publishing h...

#7492

John La Nauze

1911 - 1990 (79 years)

John Andrew La Nauze was an Australian historian from Western Australia. He was born in the Goldfields town of Boulder. Shortly after his fourth birthday, his Mauritian-born father Captain Charles La Nauze was killed by Turkish artillery fire at Silt Spur Gallipoli. His mother moved the family to Perth where he attended South Perth Primary School and Perth Modern School. He completed degrees in Arts at the University of Western Australia and at Balliol College, Oxford before joining the Economics Departments at Adelaide and Sydney .

#7493

Louise Ropes Loomis

1874 - 1958 (84 years)

Louise Ropes Loomis was an American historian, classicist, and translator. She was a professor of history at Wells College from 1921 to 1940, and editor of Classics Club Publications from the 1920s until 1949. In 1930, she co-founded the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians with Louise Fargo Brown.

#7494

Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey

1833 - 1911 (78 years)

Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in it...

#7495

Roger Fulford

1902 - 1983 (81 years)

Sir Roger Thomas Baldwin Fulford was an English journalist, historian, writer and politician. In the 1930s, he completed the editing of the standard edition of the diaries of Charles Greville. From the 1930s to the 1960s, he wrote several important biographies and other works. Between 1964 and 1981 he edited five volumes of letters between Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal. He was President of the Liberal Party from 1964 to 1965.

#7496

John Carl Parish

1881 - 1939 (58 years)

John Carl Parish was an American historian of American history. Parish was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He earned a degree from the Iowa State Normal School in 1902, and then from the University of Iowa in 1905. In 1908 he earned a Ph.D., also from the University of Iowa.

#7497

Frank Card Bourne

1914 - 1983 (69 years)

Frank Card Bourne was an American classicist. Life He was born on 17 July 1914. His parents were Moses Avander and Grace Winchester. He died in 1983. Career He graduated from Princeton University with his bachelor's degree in 1936 and a PhD in 1941. He was the Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin Language and Literature there from 1946 to 1976.

#7498

Janko Lavrin

1887 - 1986 (99 years)

Janko Lavrin was a Slovene novelist, poet, critic, translator, and historian. He was Professor Andrej Jelenc DiCaprio of Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham. An enthusiast for psycho-analysis, he wrote what he called 'psycho-critical studies' of Ibsen, Nietzsche and Tolstoy.

#7499

Cyril Falls

1888 - 1971 (83 years)

Cyril Bentham Falls CBE was a 20th Century British military historian, journalist, and academic, noted for his works on the First World War. Early life Falls was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 2 March 1888, the eldest son of Sir Charles Falls, an Ulster landowner in County Tyrone. He received his formal education at the Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, and London University. At the age of 27, he published his first book, 'Rudyard Kipling: A Critical Study' .

#7500

R. B. Merriman

1876 - 1945 (69 years)

Roger Bigelow Merriman was an American historian and a practitioner of scientific historiography developed by German historians. He is known especially for his multivolume history of the Spanish Empire.

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