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,
#7851
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.
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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...
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Marshall Hodgson
1922 - 1968 (46 years)
Marshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson , was an Islamic studies academic and a world historian at the University of Chicago. He was chairman of the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought in Chicago. Life Marshall Hodgson was born in Richmond, Indiana in April 11, 1922. He was a practicing Quaker and a strict vegetarian. He worked in the Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector from 1943 to 1946. In 1951, he received his PhD from the University of Chicago, where he later became professor, receiving tenure in 1961, becoming chairman of the Committee in Social Thought in 1964 and the newly established Committee on Near Eastern Studies in the same year.
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Gilbert Chinard
1881 - 1972 (91 years)
Gilbert Chinard was a French-American historian, professor emeritus, who authored over 40 books. Born on October 17, 1881, in Chatellerault, France, to Hilaire and Marie Chinard, educated at the Universities of Poitiers and Bordeaux, in 1908, he married Emma Blanchard, then moved to New York as a visiting instructor in French Literature, leading him in an American academic career, teaching positions at Brown University , the University of California, Berkeley , Johns Hopkins University , and Princeton University .
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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.
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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.
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Theodore Plucknett
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Theodore Frank Thomas Plucknett was a British legal historian who was the first chair of legal history at the London School of Economics. Plucknett was born on 2 January 1897 in Bristol. Plucknett completed his early education at Alderman Newton's School in Leicester and then Bacup and Rawstenstall school in Newchurch, Lancashire. He completed his degree in history at London University and graduated with second class honours. He later completed his master's degree at University College London before his twenty-first birthday. He was also awarded the Alexander prize of the Royal Historical Society.
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Merritt Yerkes Hughes
1893 - 1971 (78 years)
Merritt Yerkes Hughes Hughes was an expert in the literature of France, England and Italy. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1925, the first year they were given. Life Hughes was born May 24, 1893, in Philadelphia; he received a bachelor's degree from Boston University in 1915, a master's degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1918, a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1921 and a D.Litt. from the University of Edinburgh in 1950.
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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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Jérôme Carcopino
1881 - 1970 (89 years)
Jérôme Carcopino was a French historian and author. He was the fifteenth member elected to occupy seat 3 of the Académie française, in 1955. Biography Carcopino was born at Verneuil-sur-Avre, Eure, son of a doctor from a Corsican family related to Bonaparte, and educated at the École Normale Supérieure where he specialised in history. From 1904 to 1907 he was a member of the French School in Rome. In 1912 he was a professor of history in Le Havre. In 1912 he became a lecturer at the University of Algiers and inspector of antiquities in Algeria until 1920. His career was interrupted by World War I when he served in the Dardanelles.
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George Sansom
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Sir George Bailey Sansom was a British diplomat and historian of pre-modern Japan, particularly noted for his historical surveys and his attention to Japanese society and culture. Early life Sansom was born in London, where his father was a naval architect, but was educated in France and Germany, including the University of Giessen and the University of Marburg. He passed an examination for the Diplomatic Service in September 1903.
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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.
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Francis Utley
1907 - 1974 (67 years)
Francis Lee Utley was a folklorist, linguist, medievalist, scholar of onomastics and literature, educator, and author. Life and career Born and raised in Watertown, Wisconsin, Utley attended the University of Wisconsin, from which he graduated with honors in 1929. He did his graduate literary studies at Harvard, earning the M.A. in 1934 and the Ph.D. in 1936. At Harvard, he came under the influence of George Lyman Kittredge in English who encouraged Utley's study of folklore. In 1936, he married Ruth Alice Scott and they had three children: Philip Lee, Andrew Scott, and Jean Marie.
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John Edwin Pomfret
1898 - 1981 (83 years)
John Edwin Pomfret was an American academic and administrator who served as the director of the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery and the twentieth president of the College of William & Mary.
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Hans-Joachim Schoeps
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Hans-Joachim Schoeps was a German-Jewish historian of religion and religious philosophy. He was professor of religions and religious history at the University of Erlangen. Prior to World War II, Schoeps was leader of The German Vanguard , an organization of 150 Jewish students, national conservative anti-Zionists who sought total assimilation into the German nation.
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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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Cornelis de Kiewiet
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Cornelis Willem de Kiewiet was a Dutch-born American historian most notable for having served as president of Cornell University and the University of Rochester. Biography De Kiewiet was born in the Netherlands, but grew up in South Africa, where his father went as a diamond and gold-seeker and later worked as an employee of the Transvaal Republic's Railway. In the early 1920s, Cornelis earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and, in 1927, he earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of London.
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C. L. Mowat
1911 - 1970 (59 years)
Charles Loch Mowat was a British-born American historian. Biography Mowat was educated at Marlborough College and St John's College, Oxford. In 1934 he emigrated to the United States, where he became an American citizen. From 1934 until 1936 he taught at the University of Minnesota. In 1936 he took up a position at the University of California, Los Angeles. His opposition to McCarthyism led to him leaving UCLA and taking a post at the University of Chicago in 1950. In 1958 he returned to Britain to be professor of history at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, a post he held until ...
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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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Antony Andrewes
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Antony Andrewes, was an English classical scholar and historian. He was Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford from 1953 to 1977. Early life Andrewes was born in Tavistock, Devon, England, on 12 June 1910. He was educated at Winchester College from 1923 to 1929. He studied at New College, Oxford, between 1929 and 1933.
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William Abel Pantin
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
William Abel Pantin was a historian of medieval England who spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford. Life Pantin was born in Blackheath, south London, on 1 May 1902. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class degree in Modern History in 1923. He undertook research at the University of Oxford after winning a Bryce Research Studentship.
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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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Fritz Heichelheim
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Fritz Moritz Heichelheim was a German-born ancient historian, who specialized in ancient economic history, at the University of Gießen and as Professor of Greek and Roman History at the University of Toronto.
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Leonard Schapiro
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Leonard Bertram Naman Schapiro was the leading British scholar of the origins and development of the Soviet political system. He taught for many years at the London School of Economics, where he was Professor of Political Science with Special Reference to Russian Studies. Schapiro was best known for his magisterial study, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, though his early work on the rise to power of the Bolshevik Party, The Origins of the Communist Autocracy, was his most intellectually ambitious and innovative contribution to the field of Soviet studies. Because of his prominence i...
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Robert Pierpont Blake
1886 - 1950 (64 years)
Robert Pierpont Blake was an American byzantinist and scholar of the Armenian and Georgian cultures. Biography Robert P. Blake was born in San Francisco on November 1, 1886. As a John Harvard Traveling Fellow, he chiefly studied and worked, between 1911 and 1918, in Russia where he mastered Russian and began his study of Arabic, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian.
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Bell I. Wiley
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Bell Irvin Wiley was an American historian who specialized in the American Civil War and was an authority on military history and the social history of common people. He died in Atlanta, Georgia, from a heart attack.
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Dorothy Whitelock
1901 - 1982 (81 years)
Dorothy Whitelock, was an English historian. From 1957 to 1969, she was the Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Cambridge. Her best-known work is English Historical Documents, vol. I: c. 500-1042, which she edited. It is a compilation of translated sources, with introductions.
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Sidney Painter
1902 - 1960 (58 years)
Sidney Painter was an American medievalist and historian. He was a fellow of the Mediaeval Academy and professor of history and chairman of the department of history at Johns Hopkins University. Life and career Painter was born in New York City; after the Taft School he attended Yale University . He was an influential member of American academia in the 1950s and served on many boards and committees. He was treasurer and secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies and was a member of the council of the Mediaeval Academy. He was made a fellow in 1953. That same year, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
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Walter Houghton
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Walter Edwards Houghton was an American historian of Victorian literature, best known for editing the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. Biography Houghton was educated at Yale University, where he graduated in 1924 and was a member of Skull and Bones. He taught at Harvard University before moving to Wellesley College in 1942. He remained at Wellesley until retirement in 1969. With his wife Esther he continued to work on the Wellesley Index: three volumes appeared before his death, and two more volumes were completed for publication after his death.
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Henrietta Larson
1894 - 1983 (89 years)
Henrietta Melia Larson was an American business historian. Life and work Henrietta Melia Larson was born in Ostrander, Minnesota on 24 September 1894 to Hans Olaf Larson and Maria Karen Nordgarden . Her sister was Agnes Larson. She received her B.A. from St. Olaf College in 1918 and taught one year of high school before she became an instructor at Augustana College in 1921–22. She studied at the University of Minnesota in 1922–24, then taught at Bethany College from 1925 to 1926. Larson received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and The Wheat Market and the Farmer in Minnesota, 1858–1900 in 1926.
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Jean-Rémy Palanque
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Jean-Rémy Palanque was a professor of ancient history at the Faculty of Letters at Montpellier, then at the University of Aix-en-Provence. He was a member of the Institute, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and president of the Society of Religious History of France. He contributed, with Henri-Irénée Marrou, to the renewal of the historical interpretation of the Roman Empire and early Christianity. He has translated and completed in French the works by the Austrian historian Ernst Stein, who was devoted to the history of late antiquity. He was awarded the Medal of the Resistance in 1945.
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William Harris Stahl
1908 - 1969 (61 years)
William Harris Stahl was an American historian of science and professor of classics at New York University and Brooklyn College, known for his translation of Macrobius' Commentary on the Dream of Scipio and his 1962 book Roman Science.
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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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A. M. Woodward
1883 - 1973 (90 years)
Arthur Maurice Woodward was a British archaeologist and ancient historian who was director of the British School at Athens from 1923 to 1929. He was later head of the department of ancient history at the University of Sheffield. During the First World War he served with the British Army in the British Salonika Force and was mentioned in despatches.
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Frank Underhill
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Frank Hawkins Underhill, SM, FRSC was a Canadian journalist, essayist, historian, social critic, and political thinker. Biography Frank Underhill, born in Stouffville, Ontario, was educated at the University of Toronto and the University of Oxford in which he was a member of the Fabian Society. He was influenced by social and political critics such as George Bernard Shaw and Goldwin Smith. He taught history at the University of Saskatchewan from 1914 until 1927 with a long interruption during World War I during which he served as an officer in the Hertfordshire Regiment of the British Army on the Western Front.
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