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,
#7701
John Fiske
1842 - 1901 (59 years)
John Fiske was an American philosopher and historian. He was heavily influenced by Herbert Spencer and applied Spencer's concepts of evolution to his own writings on linguistics, philosophy, religion, and history.
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Moritz Cantor
1829 - 1920 (91 years)
Moritz Benedikt Cantor was a German historian of mathematics. Biography Cantor was born at Mannheim. He came from a Sephardi Jewish family that had emigrated to the Netherlands from Portugal, another branch of which had established itself in Russia. In his early youth, Moritz Cantor was not strong enough to go to school, and his parents decided to educate him at home. Later, however, he was admitted to an advanced class of the Gymnasium in Mannheim. From there he went to the University of Heidelberg in 1848, and soon after to the University of Göttingen, where he studied under Gauss and Weber...
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Curt Weibull
1886 - 1991 (105 years)
Curt Weibull was a Swedish historian, educator and author. Biography Curt Hugo Johannes Weibull was born in Lund, Sweden. He was a member of the Weibull family. He was the son of professor Martin Weibull and brother of historian Lauritz Weibull . He and his brother both attended the University of Lund. The Weibull brothers have been characterized as influential in raising the scientific standards of history research in Sweden and Denmark.
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George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston
1859 - 1925 (66 years)
George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, , styled Lord Curzon of Kedleston between 1898 and 1911 and then Earl Curzon of Kedleston between 1911 and 1921, was a British statesman, Conservative politician and writer who served as Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905. From 1919 to 1924 he served as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
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Aziz Suryal Atiya
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Aziz Suryal Atiya was an Egyptian Coptologist who was a Coptic historian and scholar and an expert in Islamic and Crusades studies. Atiya was the founder of the Institute of Coptic Studies in Cairo in the 1950s, and was also the founder of the Middle East Center, University of Utah.
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Francis James Child
1825 - 1896 (71 years)
Francis James Child was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, best known today for his collection of English and Scottish ballads now known as the Child Ballads. Child was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University, where he produced influential editions of English poetry. In 1876 he was named Harvard's first Professor of English, a position which allowed him to focus on academic research. It was during this time that he began work on the Child Ballads.
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Heinrich Luden
1778 - 1847 (69 years)
Heinrich Luden was a German historian. Luden was born in Loxstedt in the district of Stade. At the age of 17 Luden went to the Domschule in Bremen. He subsequently studied theology at the University of Göttingen, where he came under the influence of the historians August Ludwig von Schlözer and later Johannes von Müller and devoted himself to the study of history. He was briefly employed as a private tutor in the house of Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland in Berlin, in 1805 producing his thesis in Jena on Christian Thomasius. He further published biographies of Hugo Grotius and Sir William Temple ...
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Charles Gide
1847 - 1932 (85 years)
Charles Gide was a French economist and historian of economic thought. He was a professor at the University of Bordeaux, at Montpellier, at Université de Paris and finally at Collège de France. His nephew was the author André Gide.
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Ziauddin Barani
1285 - 1357 (72 years)
Ziauddin Barani was an Indian Muslim political thinker of the Delhi Sultanate located in present-day Northern India during Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Firuz Shah's reign. He was best known for composing the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi , a work on medieval India, which covers the period from the reign of Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq to the first six years of the reign of Firoz Shah Tughluq; and the Fatwa-i-Jahandari which promoted a hierarchy among Muslim communities in the Indian subcontinent, although according to M. Athar Ali it was not based on race or even like the caste system, but taking as a model of ...
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Charles Homer Haskins
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
Charles Homer Haskins was a history professor at Harvard University. He was an American historian of the Middle Ages, and an advisor to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. He is widely recognized as the first academic medieval historian in the United States, and the Haskins Medal was named in his honor.
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Meir Balaban
1877 - 1942 (65 years)
Meir Balaban or Majer Samuel Bałaban was one of the most outstanding historians of Polish and Galician Jews, and the founder of Polish Jewish historiography. Early years Balaban was born in 1877 in the city of Lviv . He received a traditional education at home and traditional Jewish schooling in a cheder.
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William Robert Shepherd
1871 - 1934 (63 years)
William Robert Shepherd was an American cartographer and historian specializing in American and Latin American history. In 1896, Shepherd completed his PhD at Columbia University. He then studied in Berlin and finally became professor of history at Columbia University. He is best known for his Historical Atlas, published in several editions during the early twentieth century. He is considered a pioneer in the field of Latin American history. Shepherd's address to the 1909 meeting of the American Historical Association was "probably the first time that a part of the program of the annual meeting was devoted to the history of other peoples in the Americas".
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Semyon Vengerov
1855 - 1920 (65 years)
Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov was the preeminent literary historian of Imperial Russia. Vengerov was the son of Chonon Vengerov and memoirist Pauline Wengeroff, a prominent Jewish family. His parents were of the few acculturated Russian Jews, and sent him to a Christian school, of which he once was expelled for refusing to kneel before an icon. As academic careers were barred to Jews, he converted to Orthodoxy after matriculating. He was the pater familias of an artistic clan that included his sisters Isabelle Vengerova, a co-founder of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and Zinaida Venger...
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Catharine Macaulay
1731 - 1791 (60 years)
Catharine Macaulay , was an English Whig republican historian. Early life Catharine Macaulay was a daughter of John Sawbridge and his wife Elizabeth Wanley of Olantigh. Sawbridge was a landed proprietor from Wye, Kent, whose ancestors were Warwickshire yeomanry.
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George Buchanan
1506 - 1582 (76 years)
George Buchanan was a Scottish historian and humanist scholar. According to historian Keith Brown, Buchanan was "the most profound intellectual sixteenth century Scotland produced." His ideology of resistance to royal usurpation gained widespread acceptance during the Scottish Reformation. Brown says the ease with which King James VII was deposed in 1689 shows the power of Buchananite ideas.
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Odoric of Pordenone
1286 - 1331 (45 years)
Odoric of Pordenone , was a Franciscan friar and missionary explorer from the historical Patriarch of Friuli in northeast Italy. He journeyed through India, Sumatra, Java, and China, where he spent three years in the imperial capital of Khanbaliq . After more than ten years of travel, he returned home and dictated a narrative of his experiences and observations called the Relatio, highlighting various cultural, religious, and social peculiarities he encountered in Asia.
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Pei Songzhi
372 - 451 (79 years)
Pei Songzhi , courtesy name Shiqi, was a Chinese historian and politician who lived in the late Eastern Jin dynasty and the Liu Song dynasty. His ancestral home was in Wenxi County, Shanxi, but he moved to the Jiangnan region later. He is best known for making annotations to the historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms written by Chen Shou in the third century, providing additional details omitted from the original work. His commentary, completed in 429, became integral to later editions of the Sanguozhi, making the joint work three times as long as the original. His son, Pei Yin , and g...
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Frederick Merk
1887 - 1977 (90 years)
Frederick Merk was an American historian. He taught at Harvard University from 1924 to 1956. Biography Frederick Merk was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1887. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1911 and then worked for five years at the Wisconsin Historical Society. In 1916 he went to Harvard University to study under Frederick Jackson Turner. Upon Turner's retirement in 1924, Merk took up his position with Turner's support. He taught at Harvard until 1956, and oversaw several dozen graduate students.
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Erik Pontoppidan
1698 - 1764 (66 years)
Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan was a Danish author, a Lutheran bishop of the Church of Norway, a historian, and an antiquarian. His Catechism of the Church of Denmark heavily influenced Danish and Norwegian religious thought and practice for roughly the next 200 years after its 1737 publication.
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Stanoje Stanojević
1874 - 1937 (63 years)
Stanoje Stanojević was a Serbian historian, university professor, academic and a leader of many scientific and publishing enterprises. Career Stanojević finished university studies in Belgrade's Grandes écoles and post-graduate studies in philosophy in Vienna, where he received his PhD in 1896. He was a student of Konstantin Jireček, Vatroslav Jagić and Karl Krumbacher, and a follower of Ilarion Ruvarac and his school of historiography. Stanojević belongs to the first generation of Serbian historians educated abroad, at European universities. In 1903, he became a professor of the Grande école , his alma mater.
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John Bach McMaster
1852 - 1932 (80 years)
John Bach McMaster was an American historian. McMaster was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, a native of New York, was a banker and planter at New Orleans at the beginning of the Civil War. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1872, worked as a civil engineer in 1873–1877, was instructor in civil engineering at Princeton University in 1877–1883, and in 1883 became professor of American history in the University of Pennsylvania. McMaster was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1884. McMaster was the second president of The Franklin Inn Club, servin...
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Hector Boece
1465 - 1536 (71 years)
Hector Boece , known in Latin as Hector Boecius or Boethius, was a Scottish philosopher and historian, and the first Principal of King's College in Aberdeen, a predecessor of the University of Aberdeen.
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Jean van Heijenoort
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
Jean Louis Maxime van Heijenoort was a historian of mathematical logic. He was also a personal secretary to Leon Trotsky from 1932 to 1939, and an American Trotskyist until 1947. Life Jean van Heijenoort, a renowned mathematician and logician, was born in Creil, France. His parents had immigrated from the Netherlands before his birth. Unfortunately, when van Heijenoort was only two years old, his father passed away, leaving his family in financial hardship. Despite these challenges, he pursued his education and became proficient in French. Throughout his life, he maintained strong connection...
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Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr
624 - 692 (68 years)
Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam was the leader of a caliphate based in Mecca that rivaled the Umayyads from 683 until his death. The son of al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam and Asma bint Abi Bakr, and the grandson of the first caliph Abu Bakr, Ibn al-Zubayr belonged to the Quraysh, the leading tribe of the nascent Muslim community, and was the first child born to the Muhajirun, Islam's earliest converts, thus a Companion of the Prophet. As a youth, he participated in the early Muslim conquests alongside his father in Syria and Egypt, and later played a role in the Muslim conquests of North Africa and northern Iran in 647 and 650, respectively.
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Lin Zexu
1785 - 1850 (65 years)
Lin Zexu , courtesy name Yuanfu, was a Chinese political philosopher and politician. He was a head of state , Governor General, scholar-official, and under the Daoguang Emperor of the Qing dynasty best known for his role in the First Opium War of 1839–42. He was from Fuzhou, Fujian Province. Lin's forceful opposition to the opium trade was a primary catalyst for the First Opium War. He is praised for his constant position on the "moral high ground" in his fight, but he is also blamed for a rigid approach which failed to account for the domestic and international complexities of the problem. Th...
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Ibn Sa'd
784 - 845 (61 years)
Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Sa‘d ibn Manī‘ al-Baṣrī al-Hāshimī or simply Ibn Sa'd and nicknamed Scribe of Waqidi , was a scholar and Arabian biographer. Ibn Sa'd was born in 784/785 CE and died on 16 February 845 CE . Ibn Sa'd was from Basra, but lived mostly in Baghdad, hence the nisba al-Basri and al-Baghdadi respectively. He is said to have died at the age of 62 in Baghdad and was buried in the cemetery of the Syrian gate.
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Percy Ernst Schramm
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Percy Ernst Schramm was a German historian who specialized in art history and medieval history. Schramm was a Chair and Professor of History at the University of Göttingen from 1929 to 1963. Early life and education Schramm was born to a wealthy and cosmopolitan family in Hamburg, that belonged to the class of Hanseatic families. His father, Max Schramm, was a lawyer, senator and second mayor from 1925 to 1928. His grandfather Ernst Schramm had been a major sugar merchant in Hamburg and Brazil. His mother Olga O'Swald, grandniece of William Henry O'Swald, also belonged to a prominent Hansea...
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Francesco Guicciardini
1483 - 1540 (57 years)
Francesco Guicciardini was an Italian historian and statesman. A friend and critic of Niccolò Machiavelli, he is considered one of the major political writers of the Italian Renaissance. In his masterpiece, The History of Italy, Guicciardini paved the way for a new style in historiography with his use of government sources to support arguments and the realistic analysis of the people and events of his time.
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Charles I of Hungary
1288 - 1342 (54 years)
Charles I, also known as Charles Robert , was King of Hungary and Croatia from 1308 to his death. He was a member of the Capetian House of Anjou and the only son of Charles Martel, Prince of Salerno. His father was the eldest son of Charles II of Naples and Mary of Hungary. Mary laid claim to Hungary after her brother, Ladislaus IV of Hungary, died in 1290, but the Hungarian prelates and lords elected her cousin, Andrew III, king. Instead of abandoning her claim to Hungary, she transferred it to her son, Charles Martel, and after his death in 1295, to her grandson, Charles. On the other hand, ...
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Han Yu
768 - 824 (56 years)
Han Yu , courtesy name Tuizhi , and commonly known by his posthumous name Han Wengong , was an essayist, Confucian scholar, poet, and government official during the Tang dynasty who significantly influenced the development of Neo-Confucianism. Described as "comparable in stature to Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe" for his influence on the Chinese literary tradition, Han Yu stood for strong central authority in politics and orthodoxy in cultural matters.
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Iosif Amusin
1910 - 1984 (74 years)
Iosif Davidovich Amusin was a Soviet historian, orientalist, hebraist and papyrologyst, was specialist in the history of the Ancient Near East and Qumran studies. History Amusin was twice arrested and sentenced for Zionist connections and "anti-Soviet" activity . Graduated from the Historical Faculty of Leningrad University . Served as a medical officer during the Second World War.
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Andrew II of Hungary
1175 - 1235 (60 years)
Andrew II , also known as Andrew of Jerusalem, was King of Hungary and Croatia between 1205 and 1235. He ruled the Principality of Halych from 1188 until 1189/1190, and again between 1208/1209 and 1210. He was the younger son of Béla III of Hungary, who entrusted him with the administration of the newly conquered Principality of Halych in 1188. Andrew's rule was unpopular, and the boyars expelled him. Béla III willed property and money to Andrew, obliging him to lead a crusade to the Holy Land. Instead, Andrew forced his elder brother, King Emeric of Hungary, to cede Croatia and Dalmatia as an appanage to him in 1197.
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Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.
1888 - 1965 (77 years)
Arthur Meier Schlesinger was an American historian who taught at Harvard University, pioneering social history and urban history. He was a Progressive Era intellectual who stressed material causes and downplayed ideology and values as motivations for historical actors. He was highly influential as a director of PhD dissertations at Harvard for three decades, especially in the fields of social, women's, and immigration history. His son, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. , also taught at Harvard and was a noted historian.
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Johannes Aventinus
1477 - 1534 (57 years)
Johann Georg Turmair , known by the pen name Johannes Aventinus or Aventin, was a Bavarian Renaissance humanist historian and philologist. He authored the 1523 Annals of Bavaria, a valuable record of the early history of Germany.
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Niketas Choniates
1155 - 1217 (62 years)
Niketas or Nicetas Choniates , whose actual surname was Akominatos , was a Byzantine Greek historian and politician – like his brother Michael Akominatos, whom he accompanied to Constantinople from their birthplace Chonae . Nicetas wrote a history of the Eastern Roman Empire from 1118 to 1207.
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Michael Psellos
1018 - 1078 (60 years)
Michael Psellos or Psellus was a Byzantine Greek monk, savant, writer, philosopher, imperial courtier, historian and music theorist. He was born in 1017 or 1018, and is believed to have died in 1078, although it has also been maintained that he remained alive until 1096. He served as a high ranking advisor to several Byzantine emperors and was instrumental in the re-positioning of power of those emperors.
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Ernst Fabricius
1857 - 1942 (85 years)
Ernst Christian Andreas Martin Fabricius was a German historian, archaeologist and classical scholar. Between 1882 and 1888 he participated in excavations in Greece and Asia Minor and also pioneered German research on the Roman Empire border defenses known as the Limes Germanicus.
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Ludwig Timotheus Spittler
1752 - 1810 (58 years)
Ludwig Timotheus Spittler was a German historian born in Stuttgart. He published works on national, church and political history. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History. Spittler studied at Tübingen, and in 1778 became a full professor at the University of Göttingen. At Göttingen he collaborated on several important projects with historians August Ludwig von Schlözer , Johann Christoph Gatterer and constitutional law teacher Johann Stephan Pütter . With philosopher Christoph Meiners , he published the Göttingische Historische Magazin from January 1787 to August 1791.
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Hong Taiji
1592 - 1643 (51 years)
Hong Taiji , also rendered as Huang Taiji and sometimes referred to as Abahai in Western literature, also known by his temple name as the Emperor Taizong of Qing, was the second khan of the Later Jin dynasty and the founding emperor of the Qing dynasty . He was responsible for consolidating the empire that his father Nurhaci had founded and laid the groundwork for the conquest of the Ming dynasty, although he died before this was accomplished. He was also responsible for changing the name of the Jurchen ethnicity to "Manchu" in 1635, and changing the name of his dynasty from "Great Jin" to "Great Qing" in 1636.
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John Skylitzes
1040 - 1101 (61 years)
John Skylitzes, commonly Latinized as Ioannes Scylitzes , was a Byzantine historian of the late 11th century. Life Very little is known about his life. The title of his work records him as a kouropalatēs and a former droungarios of the Vigla, whereby he is usually identified with a certain John Thrakesios.
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Friedrich Heer
1916 - 1983 (67 years)
Friedrich Heer was an Austrian historian born in Vienna. Early life Heer received a PhD at the University of Vienna in 1938. Even as a student, he came into conflict with pan-German historians as a staunch opponent of National Socialism.
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Ludwig Geiger
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Ludwig Geiger was a German author and historian. Life Ludwig Geiger was born at Breslau, Silesia, a son of Abraham Geiger. After study at Heidelberg, Göttingen, and Bonn, he became docent in history at Berlin in 1873 and in 1880 was appointed to a chair of modern history there.
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Charles Singer
1876 - 1960 (84 years)
Charles Joseph Singer was a British historian of science, technology, and medicine. He served as medical officer in the British Army. Biography Early years Singer was born in Camberwell in London, where his father Simeon Singer was a rabbi and Hebraist. He was educated at City of London School, University College London, and Magdalen College, Oxford . Trained in zoology and medicine, he qualified for medical practice in 1903. He was appointed medical officer on an expedition led by Sir John Harrington to the border region between Abyssinia and Sudan on the same day his medical qualification was announced.
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Thutmose I
1600 BC - 1493 BC (107 years)
Thutmose I was the third pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. He received the throne after the death of the previous king, Amenhotep I. During his reign, he campaigned deep into the Levant and Nubia, pushing the borders of Egypt farther than ever before in each region. He also built many temples in Egypt, and a tomb for himself in the Valley of the Kings; he is the first king confirmed to have done this .
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Lauritz Weibull
1873 - 1960 (87 years)
Lauritz Ulrik Absalon Weibull was a Swedish professor and historian. Biography He was born in Lund, Sweden, as the son of history professor Martin Weibull and the brother of historian Curt Weibull. He enrolled at the University of Lund in 1892, completed his B.A. in 1894, his licentiate degree in 1899 and defended his dissertation and received a docentship the same year. He was appointed director of the Regional Archives of Lund in 1903 and became professor of history at his alma mater in 1919.
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Erich Maschke
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Erich Maschke was a German historian, history professor, and Nazi ideologue. He last taught at Heidelberg University. During the Nazi era he promoted racist and nationalist ideology. After the war he led the so-called Maschke Committee, commissioned by the West German parliament, which investigated the treatment of German prisoners-of-war during and after World War II by the Allies.
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Anton Kartashev
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
Anton Vladimirovich Kartashev was a Russian professor of Church History and a journalist. Briefly in 1917 he was the last Ober-Procurator of the Most Holy Governing Synod of the Orthodox Church in Russia and Minister of Religion in the Russian Provisional Government; but from 1920 he taught in Paris.
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Josef Pekař
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
Josef Pekař was a prominent Czech historian of the turn of 19th and 20th century, professor and rector of Charles University in Prague. Life and work After graduating at high school in Mladá Boleslav, which now bears his name, Pekař studied history in Prague. He started the career of historian already during studies, when his article, published in 1890 in Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk's magazine Athenaeum, proved by historical findings, that so called "Manuscript of Králův Dvůr" , allegedly from the 13th century, whose authenticity has long led disputes in the Czech society, is a counterfeit. Pekař ...
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Karl Sudhoff
1853 - 1938 (85 years)
Karl Sudhoff was a German historian of medicine, helping establish that field as a legitimate discipline for research and teaching within faculties of medicine. Sudhoff taught for years at the University of Leipzig, where he founded the Institute for the History of Medicine and exercised strong control over the direction of German medical history. He also established the journal Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin, later renamed Sudhoffs Archiv, and the monograph series Studien zur Geschichte der Medizin. As a researcher, he had a reputation for strength in archival research, and made a particular contribution to the revival of interest in Paracelsus and Constantine the African.
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Otto Seeck
1850 - 1921 (71 years)
Otto Karl Seeck was a German classical historian who is perhaps best known for his work on the decline of the ancient world. He was born in Riga. Life and career He first began studying chemistry at the University of Dorpat but transferred to the University of Berlin to study classical history under Theodor Mommsen. Seeck earned his doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1872 after writing his thesis on the Notitia Dignitatum, a document enumerating the roles and responsibilities of administrative officials of the later Roman empire c. 400 AD. He habilitated under Mommsen in Berlin in 1...
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