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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,

#7751

John Shelton Curtiss

1899 - 1983 (84 years)

John Shelton Curtiss , was an American historian of Russia and historical scholar of old Yankee stock. Curtiss was a longtime professor of history at Duke University. Early life and education John Shelton Curtiss was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of prominent attorney, Harlow Clarke Curtiss and his socialite wife, Ethel Curtiss. His maternal grandfather was Dr. Matthew D. Mann.

#7752

William B. Hesseltine

1902 - 1963 (61 years)

William Best Hesseltine was an American historian and politician. As a historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for nearly three decades, Hesseltine's field of expertise was mid-19th century American history, especially the Civil War, Reconstruction Era and American South. He also became known as the mentor of a generation of American historians, many of whom also won prizes for their writing.

#7753

Roberto Weiss

1906 - 1969 (63 years)

Roberto Weiss was an Italian-British scholar and historian who specialised in the fields of Italian-English cultural contacts during the period of the Renaissance, and of Renaissance humanism. Early career Weiss was born in Milan, Italy. After spending his later childhood in Rome, he came to Britain to study law at Oxford University. He worked for a short time from 1932 to 1933 in the Department of Western Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, and obtained his D.Phil from Oxford in 1934, in the same year winning the Charles Oldham prize. He was naturalised British in 1934. The author John Buchan became his friend and mentor.

#7754

Eleanora Carus-Wilson

Eleanora Carus-Wilson

1897 - 1977 (80 years)

Eleanora Mary Carus-Wilson, FBA was a British economic historian. Known for her work on rural Medieval textile industries in England, she made significant contributions to the understanding of that technology in the region.

#7755

Anthony Blunt

1907 - 1983 (76 years)

Anthony Frederick Blunt , styled Sir Anthony Blunt KCVO from 1956 to November 1979, was a leading British art historian and Soviet spy. Blunt was a professor of art history at the University of London, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. His 1967 monograph on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin is still widely regarded as a watershed book in art history. His teaching text and reference work Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, first published in 1953, reached its fifth edition in 1999, at which time it was still considered the best ...

#7756

W. N. Medlicott

1900 - 1987 (87 years)

William Norton Medlicott was a British historian. He was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham College, University College London and the Institute of Historical Research. In 1926 Medlicott took up a post at University College, Swansea and in 1936 he married Dorothy Kathleen Coveney. Medlicott worked at the Board of Trade for the first year of the Second World War before being selected by Sir Keith Hancock to be a member of the Cabinet Office Historical Section. Medlicott published the results of his research in his two-volume work The Economic Blockade.

#7757

Friedrich Lütge

1901 - 1968 (67 years)

Friedrich Lütge was a German economist, social historian and economic historian. He taught at the Leipzig Graduate School of Management and at the University of Leipzig between 1940 and 1947, then moving on to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where he taught till a few months before he died. Through his research work between 1949 and 1968 he exercised a great influence on the understanding of economic history in West Germany. Together with Wilhelm Abel and Günther Franz he contributed decisively to research into agrarian history in Germany. He was instrumental in ensuring that soci...

#7758

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.

#7759

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.

#7760

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.

#7761

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.

#7762

Alfred Whitney Griswold

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.

#7763

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.

#7764

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".

#7765

Arthur Llewellyn Basham

Arthur Llewellyn Basham

1914 - 1986 (72 years)

Arthur Llewellyn Basham was a noted historian, Indologist and author of a number of books. As a Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London in the 1950s and the 1960s, he taught a number of famous historians of India, including professors Ram Sharan Sharma, Romila Thapar, and V. S. Pathak and Thomas R. Trautmann and David Lorenzen.

#7766

James C. Malin

1893 - 1979 (86 years)

James Claude Malin was an American historian and professor of history who taught at the University of Kansas and was involved with the Kansas Historical Society, including as its president. Bibliography The United States after the World War, New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1972John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-SixEssays on HistoriographyThe Nebraska Question, 1852-1854Confounded Rot about Napoleon : Reflections Upon Science and Technology, nationalism, World Depression of the Eighteen-Nineties, and AfterwardsThe Grassland of North America : prolegomena to its History, 1947Winter Wheat i...

#7767

David Diringer

1900 - 1975 (75 years)

David Diringer was a British linguist, palaeographer and writer. He was the author of several well-known books about writing systems. Biography Diringer was born to Jacob Munzer and Mirl Diringer on 16 June 1900, in Tlumacz – at that time considered part of Austria, later Poland, but now Tlumach, Ukraine. He stayed in Tlumacz through high school but moved to Italy to earn, in 1927, his Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Florence. This was followed, in 1929, by a diploma in ancient history. He was appointed a professor at Florence , his first academic interest being the culture of the Etruscans.

#7768

Richard Pares

1902 - 1958 (56 years)

Richard Pares was a British historian. He "was considered to be among the outstanding British historians of his time." Family life and education The eldest son of the five children of the historian Bernard Pares and his wife Margaret Ellis, Richard Pares won scholarships at Winchester College and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first-class degree in literae humaniores in 1924. On obtaining his Oxford degree, he was elected to a fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford, which he retained until 1945. In 1937, he married Janet Lindsay Powicke, daughter of the historian F. Maurice P...

#7769

Benjamin A. Botkin

1901 - 1975 (74 years)

Benjamin Albert Botkin was an American folklorist and scholar. Early life Botkin was born on February 7, 1901, in East Boston, Massachusetts, to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. He attended the English High School of Boston and then studied at Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1920 with a B.A. in English. He earned his M.A. in English at Columbia University a year later in 1921, and his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1931, where he studied under Louise Pound and William Duncan Strong.

#7770

Dixon Wecter

1906 - 1950 (44 years)

Dixon Wecter was an American historian. He was "the first professor of American History" at the University of Sydney, and the Margaret Byrne Professor of United States History at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the author of three books.

#7771

Charles C. Tansill

1890 - 1964 (74 years)

Charles Callan Tansill was an American historian and the author of fourteen history books. He was a professor of history at American University, Fordham University, and Georgetown University. An isolationist before World War II, he was accused of revisionism after the war.

#7772

Caroline F. Ware

1899 - 1990 (91 years)

Caroline Farrar Ware was a professor of history and a New Deal activist. Her work focused on community development, consumer protection, industrial development, civil rights, and women's issues. Biography

#7773

Georges Florovsky

Georges Florovsky

1893 - 1979 (86 years)

Georges Vasilievich Florovsky was a Russian Orthodox priest, theologian, and historian. Born in the Russian Empire, he spent his working life in Paris and New York . With Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky, Justin Popović and Dumitru Stăniloae he was one of the more influential Eastern Orthodox Christian theologians of the mid-20th century. He was particularly concerned that modern Christian theology might receive inspiration from the lively intellectual debates of the patristic traditions of the undivided Church rather than from later Scholastic or Reformation categories of thought.

#7774

Thomas J. Wertenbaker

1879 - 1966 (87 years)

Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker was a leading American historian and the second Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University. Early and family life Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, he was the youngest son of former CSA Colonel Charles C. Wertenbaker and his wife Fanny .

#7775

Hugh Pemberton

Hugh R. Pemberton, FRHistS, is an academic historian specialising in the late twentieth-century British politics and British social and economic policy. As of 2018, he is Professor of Contemporary British History at the University of Bristol.

#7776

Lewis Eldon Atherton

1905 - 1989 (84 years)

Lewis Eldon Atherton was an American historian and academic from Missouri. He taught at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, for over 30 years. Early life Atherton was born on March 1, 1905, in the small town of Bosworth, Missouri. He was the son of Caleb Franklin Atherton and Ethel Framer. Although born in Missouri, his family originated from Brown County, Ohio. His early years were spent on the family farm.

#7777

Romilly Jenkins

1907 - 1969 (62 years)

Romilly James Heald Jenkins was a British scholar in Byzantine and Modern Greek studies. He occupied the prestigious seat of Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London, in 1946–1960.

#7778

Andreas Hillgruber

1925 - 1989 (64 years)

Andreas Fritz Hillgruber was a conservative German historian who was influential as a military and diplomatic historian who played a leading role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. In his controversial book Zweierlei Untergang, he wrote that historians should "identify" with the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front and asserted that there was no moral difference between Allied policies towards Germany in 1944 and 1945 and the genocide waged against the Jews. The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Hillgruber was a great historian whose once-sterling reputation was in ruins as ...

#7779

John Leonard Clive

1924 - 1990 (66 years)

John Leonard Clive was an American historian. He was a professor at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He is most well known for his biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, for which he won the National Book Award for Biography and History.

#7780

Noël Denholm-Young

1904 - 1975 (71 years)

Noël Denholm-Young was an English historian. He was a Fellow and archivist of Magdalen College, Oxford specialising in the political history of late medieval England. He worked as keeper of Western manuscripts at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and later in the faculty of the University College of North Wales, Bangor. Among his publications was an edition of the chronicle Vita Edwardi Secundi.

#7781

C. Doris Hellman

C. Doris Hellman

1910 - 1973 (63 years)

Clarisse Doris Hellman Pepper was an American historian of science, "one of the first professional historians of science in the United States". She specialized in 16th- and 17th-century astronomy, wrote a book on the Great Comet of 1577, and was the translator of another book, a biography of Johannes Kepler. She became a professor at the Pratt Institute and later at the Queens College, City University of New York, and was recognized by membership in several selective academic societies.

#7782

John Bowle

1905 - 1988 (83 years)

John Edward Bowle was an English historian and writer. Education He was educated at Marlborough College. There his contemporaries included John Betjeman, who became a friend, and Anthony Blunt, about whom he was consistently negative. He was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was counted as an Aesthete. Bowle left Oxford with a Third in Modern History, 1927.

#7783

Levette J. Davidson

1894 - 1957 (63 years)

Levette J. Davidson was a nationally acclaimed expert in folklore, especially that of Colorado and the West. He was born in Eureka, Illinois May 16, 1894, one of four children. Because his grand uncle was past-President of Eureka College, a Christian seminary, Davidson was reared in the school's shadow with the option of becoming either a teacher or a preacher. He chose teaching and was awarded his B.A. from Eureka in 1915. A year later he received his A.M. degree from the University of Illinois where he received Phi Beta Kappa honors. In 1917 he earned his M.A. in social science and history at Harvard University.

#7784

Francis Dvornik

1893 - 1975 (82 years)

Francis Dvornik , in Czech František Dvorník, was a Catholic priest and academic. He is considered one of the leading twentieth-century experts on Slavic and Byzantine history, and on relations between the churches of Rome and Constantinople.

#7785

August C. Krey

1887 - 1961 (74 years)

August Charles Krey was an American medievalist. He was chairman of the Department of History at the University of Minnesota from 1944 to 1955. Biography Born in Germany, he immigrated to Wisconsin with his family as a child. He earned all his degrees from the University of Wisconsin between 1907 and 1914. He taught at the University of Texas and at the University of Illinois . In 1913, he joined the University of Minnesota, where he spent the rest of his career, heading the Department of History from 1944 until his retirement in 1955. He was a member of the council of the American Historica...

#7786

John Tate Lanning

1902 - 1976 (74 years)

John Tate Lanning was a historian of Spanish America and held the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus position at Duke University. He was a major scholar of colonial Spanish American history and worked to strengthen organizations devoted to Latin American scholarship. In one obituary he was called, “a true giant” in the field. His work on the Spanish Enlightenment in Spanish America challenged received understandings of Spanish obscurantism.

#7787

Harold James Dyos

1921 - 1978 (57 years)

Harold James Dyos was a British historian, known for his contributions to urban history. He wrote many essays addressing the issue of urbanization. Career He graduated B.A. from the London School of Economics in 1949, and gained a Ph.D. there in 1952. He taught his entire career at the University of Leicester.

#7788

Arthur Lyon Cross

1873 - 1940 (67 years)

Arthur Lyon Cross was an American historian specializing in English history. Born in Portland, Maine, he received his doctorate from Harvard and joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1899.

#7789

Ivy Pinchbeck

1898 - 1982 (84 years)

Ivy Pinchbeck was a British economic and social historian, specialising in the history of women. Her book of 1930,Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750 – 1850 was a pioneering effort in women's history, and highly influential in the next half-century. She concluded that women overall gained more than they lost from the Industrial Revolution, as compared to the dangers and unsanitary and harsh working conditions of the previous era.

#7790

Rodman W. Paul

1912 - 1987 (75 years)

Rodman Wilson Paul was an American historian who taught at the California Institute of Technology. He was known primarily as a foremost authority on California mining and agricultural Native American history.

#7791

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.

#7792

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.

#7793

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.

#7794

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.

#7795

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.

#7796

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.

#7797

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...

#7798

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.

#7799

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.

#7800

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.

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