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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,

#7901

Edmund Garratt Gardner

Edmund Garratt Gardner

1869 - 1935 (66 years)

Edmund Garratt Gardner, FBA was an English scholar and writer, specializing in Italian history and literature. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he was regarded as one of the foremost British Dante scholars.

#7902

Frederick Wood

1903 - 1989 (86 years)

Frederick Lloyd Whitfeld Wood was a notable New Zealand historian and university professor. Biography He was born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia in 1903. His father was George Arnold Wood who taught history at the University of Sydney. Wood Jr. was educated at Sydney Grammar School, Sydney University, and Balliol College, Oxford. When he returned to Sydney, he privately tutored the later Nobel-laureate Patrick White.

#7903

Themistocles Zammit

Themistocles Zammit

1864 - 1935 (71 years)

Sir Themistocles "Temi" Zammit was a Maltese archaeologist and historian, professor of chemistry, medical doctor, researcher and writer. He served as Rector of the Royal University of Malta and first Director of the National Museum of Archaeology in his native city, Valletta.

#7904

Niccolò Rodolico

1873 - 1969 (96 years)

Niccolò Rodolico was an Italian historian, a professor in the University of Messina and the University of Florence. Born at Trapani, a fishing port in Sicily, after attending the Liceo Ximenes in his home town, where he was a friend of Giovanni Gentile, Rodolico went on to the University of Bologna. There, he was a student of Giosuè Carducci, who directed him towards focussing on the study of history. At first his interests centred on the Late Middle Ages, with particular regard to the social history of Florence. Later, he turned his attention towards modern history and above all that of Tuscany and Southern Italy in the eighteenth century.

#7905

Jonathan Holloway

1900 - Present (126 years)

Jonathan Scott Holloway is an American historian, academic administrator, and the 21st president of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Holloway was named as the president of Rutgers University in January 2020 becoming the first person of color and first African American to be named president of Rutgers. He assumed the position on July 1, 2020. Before coming to Rutgers, he was the provost of Northwestern University, a position he held between August 1, 2017, and July 1, 2020. Before that, he was the dean of Yale College and Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies at Yale University.

#7906

Agnes Mure Mackenzie

1891 - 1956 (65 years)

Agnes Mure Mackenzie CBE was a Scottish historian and writer. Her middle name is frequently misspelled Muir. Life Mackenzie was the daughter of physician and surgeon Dr Murdoch Mackenzie and Sarah Agnes Mackenzie ; Agnes was born in Stornoway on Lewis, then a busy fishing port. In childhood she was taken seriously ill with scarlet fever, the after-effects of which left her with poor hearing and eyesight. Educated at home until the age of fourteen, she then attended the Nicolson Institute until the age of seventeen. She then left Lewis for Aberdeen. As an undergraduate at the University of Abe...

#7907

William Page

1861 - 1934 (73 years)

William Henry Page was a British prolific and pioneering historian and editor. For the last three decades of his life he was general editor of the Victoria County History. Life William Page was born at his family's house at Norfolk Square, Paddington, London on 4 September 1861, the fifth of six children of merchant Henry Page and Georgina . He was privately schooled locally at Dr Westmacott's School and then entered Westminster School, where his education was cut short by the death of his father in 1875. The family moved to "a genteel part" of Lewisham, and Page was articled to a civil engineer.

#7908

Claude H. Van Tyne

1869 - 1930 (61 years)

Claude Halstead Van Tyne was an American historian. He was a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in 1902. He taught history at the University of Michigan from 1903 to 1930 and wrote several books on the American Revolution. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The War of Independence in 1930.

#7909

Barbara Wertheimer

1926 - 1983 (57 years)

Barbara Mayer Wertheimer was an American historian and labor organizer. Her research specialized in United States labor and gender history. Wertheimer served as an associate professor at Cornell University from 1977 to 1983, where she cofounded and directed the Institute for Women and Work at the Industrial and Labor Relations School. Wertheimer was also the first president and founding member of the New York Labor History Association, and is known for her monograph We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America .

#7910

Otto Brunner

1898 - 1982 (84 years)

Otto Brunner was an Austrian historian. He is best known for his work on later medieval and early modern European social history. Brunner's research made a sharp break with the traditional forms of political and social history practiced in German and Austrian academia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, proposing in its place a new model of social history informed by attention to "folkish" cultural values, particularly as related to political violence and ideas of lordship and leadership.

#7911

Marijan Mole

1924 - 1963 (39 years)

Marijan Molé was a Slovenian-Polish scholar of Middle and Modern Iranian studies, who also contributed to the fields of Islamic and particularly Sufi studies. Biography His father, Vojeslav Molé , was a Slovenian writer and historian of art who lectured at the University of Ljubljana. In 1925 he moved as a visiting professor to Poland, the native land of Marijan's mother. Molé showed an early interest in linguistics and mathematics. When World War II broke out, his family escaped to Leopoli in Ukraine. Back in Poland, he obtained his doctorate in Iranian philology under the direction of Tadeusz Jan Kowalski at the Jagiellonian University.

#7912

Hem Chandra Raychaudhuri

1892 - 1957 (65 years)

Hem Chandra Raychaudhuri was an Indian historian, known for his studies on ancient India. Early life and education He came from a Baidya family. He was the son of Manoranjan Raychaudhuri, the Zamindar of Ponabalia in the present-day Jhalokati District in Bangladesh, and his wife Tarangini Devi. He completed his schooling at Brajamohan Institution in Barisal. He passed the University of Calcutta's entrance examination in 1907, standing first. He then joined Scottish Church College, Calcutta and after that Presidency College, Calcutta, standing First in the First Class in his B.A. examination in 1911.

#7913

Julius Ruska

1867 - 1949 (82 years)

Julius Ferdinand Ruska was a German orientalist, historian of science and educator. He was a critical scholar of alchemical literature, and of Islamic science, raising many issues on attributions and sources of the texts, and providing translations. The range of his studies was wide, including the Emerald Tablet, a basic hermetic text. From 1924 he headed an institute in Heidelberg, where he has been a student.

#7914

Clarence C. Clendenen

1899 - 1977 (78 years)

Clarence Clemens Clendenen was an American historian. He won the 1960 Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association for The United States and Pancho Villa. Biography Clarence C. Clendenen was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado on June 8, 1899.

#7915

James Allen Vann

1939 - 1986 (47 years)

James Allen Vann III was an American historian, specializing in German history of the early modern period. He was a professor of History at Emory University. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he graduated from Washington and Lee University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1961. He served two years in the army, then entered Harvard University, where he received the Doctorate of Philosophy in 1970. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan that same year. He served on the faculty of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1983–84. Following his assignment ...

#7916

Louis R. Gottschalk

1899 - 1975 (76 years)

Louis Reichenthal Gottschalk was an American historian, an expert on Lafayette and the French Revolution. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago, where he was the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of History.

#7917

Thomas Heebøll-Holm

1900 - Present (126 years)

Thomas Heebøll-Holm is a medieval historian at the SAXO Institute at the University of Copenhagen. He is most known for his research involving medieval knights and the possibility that they suffered from Post-traumatic stress disorder and other hardships. In his research, Heeboll-Holm has aimed to apply modern military psychology on the history of knights, using information gained in recent decades on the psychological effects of war on soldiers. Heeboll-Holm has studied a number of ancient texts but has focused on three books by Geoffroi de Charny.

#7918

Otto Vossler

1902 - 1987 (85 years)

Otto Vossler was a German historian. Life Born in Heidelberg, Vossler was the younger son of the Romanist Karl Vossler and his wife Ester Countess Gnoli, daughter of the Italian poet and literary historian Count Domenico Gnoli. Growing up in the bilingual parental home, Vossler could translate and publish after the death of his father his correspondence with the Italian anti-fascist Benedetto Croce. After the move of the family, Vossler attended the in Munich. He completed his studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1925 under Hermann Oncken with a doctorate on Mazzini's political thinking in the intellectual currents of his time.

#7919

Pierre Mandonnet

1858 - 1936 (78 years)

Pierre Mandonnet was a French-born, Belgian Dominican historian, important in the neo-Thomist trend of historiography and the recovery of medieval philosophy. He made his reputation with a study of Siger of Brabant.

#7920

Jean Bruchési

1901 - 1979 (78 years)

Jean Bruchési, FRSC was a Canadian writer, historian, public servant, and diplomat. He was the president of the Royal Society of Canada for 1953–4. He was the son of Charles Bruchési, KC and the nephew of Paul Bruchési, Archbishop of Montreal.

#7921

Erwin Walter Palm

1910 - 1988 (78 years)

Erwin Walter Palm was a German Latin American scholar, historian, and writer. Early years Palm was born 28 August 1910 in Frankfurt am Main, in a house that was located near today's Suhrkamp house. He is the only survivor of the Holocaust from his family, his relatives having been murdered by the Nazi regime. Palm studied archaeology at the University of Heidelberg, where he met a fellow student who would become his wife, Hilde Löwenstein .

#7922

Abram L. Sachar

Abram L. Sachar

1899 - 1993 (94 years)

Abram Leon Sachar was an American historian and founding president of Brandeis University. Early life and education He was born in New York City to Samuel Sachar, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, and Sarah Abramowitz, a native of Jerusalem. When he was 7 years old, his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where his grandfather served as a chief rabbi. He was briefly enlisted for service in World War I, and then attended Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees in history. During his junior year, he studied languages at Harvard and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1920.

#7923

Howard R. Driggs

Howard R. Driggs

1873 - 1963 (90 years)

Howard Roscoe Driggs was an English professor at the University of Utah and New York University. He also was the author or editor of more than 50 books, including at least seven novels. Driggs was born in Pleasant Grove, Utah. His parents had come to Utah with the Mormon pioneers. Driggs studied at Brigham Young Academy, the University of Utah, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees, the University of Chicago, and New York University where he received his Ph.D. in 1926.

#7924

Jackson Mutero Chirenje

1935 - 1988 (53 years)

Jackson Mutero Chirenje was a Zimbabwean historian. He was born in Mudzimuirema, Chihota, Rhodesia. He served as Secretary of the African Teachers' Union of Rhodesia in 1961. He received a B.A. in history from Boston University, an M.A. in history from the University of California at Los Angeles and a PhD. in history from University of London. He taught African history, African philosophy and Afro-American history at Harvard University. He was a senior lecturer and chairman of the history department at the University of Zimbabwe.

#7925

Laurence Lafore

1917 - 1985 (68 years)

Laurence David Lafore was an American historian. Background Lafore was born into a wealthy family off the Main Line of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Lafore family was a Huguenot family that fled France following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The family fled first to England and then to North America, landing in 1701.

#7926

Michael Sadler

1861 - 1943 (82 years)

Sir Michael Ernest Sadler was an English historian, educationalist and university administrator. He worked at Victoria University of Manchester and was the vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds. He was also a champion of the English public school system.

#7927

Paolo Spriano

1925 - 1988 (63 years)

Paolo Spriano was an Italian historian of the Italian labor and communist movement. Career Spriano studied at the University of Turin. He joined partisans of the Italian Resistance and was a member of the Giustizia e Libertà. After the war he became a journalist for l'Unita and in 1946 joined the Italian Communist Party and was subsequently elected a member of its central committee. He was one of members of the PCI who opposed the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian 1956 uprising. All his historiographical production is centered on moments and figures of the Italian and international labor movement.

#7928

Friedrich Münzer

1868 - 1942 (74 years)

Friedrich Münzer was a German classical scholar noted for the development of prosopography, particularly for his demonstrations of how family relationships in ancient Rome connected to political struggles. He died in Theresienstadt concentration camp.

#7929

George Barton Cutten

1874 - 1962 (88 years)

George Barton Cutten was a Canadian-born psychologist, moral philosopher, historian and university administrator. He was president of Acadia University from 1910 to 1922 and Colgate University from 1922 to 1942.

#7930

Paul Leser

1899 - 1984 (85 years)

Paul Leser was a German-American ethnologist. Life Paul Leser came from a well-to-do Jewish family in Frankfurt. His father was a provincial high court judge. Leser attended the Goethe-Gymnasium, Frankfurt from 1908 to 1917 and studied ethnology at the University of Bonn in 1919. He was a student of Fritz Graebner and was conferred a doctorate by him in March 1925. From 1928 until 1930 he was employed as a scientific laborer at the Museum for Ethnology in Frankfurt am Main. In 1929 he lectured at the Technical University at Darmstadt and became an associate professor for ethnology. From 1929 until 1933 he taught as an associate professor for ethnology on the Technical College of Darmstadt .

#7931

Agnieszka Biedrzycka

1900 - Present (126 years)

Agnieszka Biedrzycka is a Polish historian and writer from the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences . She obtained her doctorate in December 2002 from the Faculty of History of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Biedrzycka serves as research scientist and editor for the multi-volume Polish Biographical Dictionary published by PAN incrementally. She is in charge of the History of Poland in the Early Modern era department. Since the 1989 return to democracy from under the Soviet-led totalitarian control, many distortions printed there have already been corrected. H...

#7932

Robert Digges Wimberly Connor

Robert Digges Wimberly Connor

1878 - 1950 (72 years)

Robert Digges Wimberly Connor was an American historian who served as the first state archivist of North Carolina from 1907 to 1921, and later as the first Archivist of the United States from 1934 to 1941.

#7933

Edward Everett Dale

1879 - 1972 (93 years)

Edward Everett Dale was an American historian and longtime faculty member of the University of Oklahoma. He was a proponent of Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" and is known as a major influence on the historian Angie Debo.

#7934

Arthur James Grant

1862 - 1948 (86 years)

Arthur James Grant was an English historian. Early life and education Born in Farlesthorpe, Lincolnshire, Grant was the son of Samuel Grant. He was educated at Boston Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge where he graduated BA in Classics in 1884, with a first class in both parts of the tripos and a distinction in Ancient History. He became a University Extension lecturer.

#7935

Louis Halphen

1880 - 1950 (70 years)

Louis Sigismond Isaac Halphen was a French medieval specialist and the author of many important books over a long career. He was noteworthy as the editor of a modern edition of the famous classic Einhard's "Vie de Charlemagne" , He was also known as being one of the general editors of the monumental series Peuples et civilisations.

#7936

Luc Lacourcière

1910 - 1989 (79 years)

Luc Lacourcière, CC was a Quebec writer and ethnographer, who established himself during his lifetime as a leading figure in folklore studies. Trained by Marius Barbeau, he in turn influenced renowned researchers such as linguist Claude Poirier. In 1944, Lacourcière founded the Archives de folklore , which he directed until 1975. Since 1978, a Luc-Lacourcière medal has been awarded every two years.

#7937

Robert Howard Hodgkin

Robert Howard Hodgkin

1877 - 1951 (74 years)

Robert Howard Hodgkin , who went by Robin, was an English historian. Hodgkin taught at the Queen's College, Oxford, from 1900 to 1937 and served as its provost from 1937 until 1946. He was particularly known for his 1935 work, A History of the Anglo-Saxons, and for his 1949 book, Six Centuries of an Oxford College.

#7938

J. B. Black

1883 - 1964 (81 years)

John Bennett Black was a Scottish historian whose primary topic of study was of Elizabethan England. From 1930 to 1953 he was Burnett-Fletcher Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen where a prize is awarded each year in his name.

#7939

Elwyn B. Robinson

1905 - 1985 (80 years)

Elwyn B. Robinson was an American historian of the North American Great Plains who focused on the US state of North Dakota. He was a professor of history at the University of North Dakota from 1953 until his retirement in 1970. He is notable both for his radio presentations “Heroes of Dakota” and for his comprehensive work History of North Dakota, which received the Award of Merit of the American Association for State and Local History. The history contained his most famous thesis, the six themes of North Dakota history, which were widely publicized and reprinted and proved to be a dominan...

#7940

Hendrik Willem van Loon

Hendrik Willem van Loon

1882 - 1944 (62 years)

Hendrik Willem van Loon was a Dutch-American historian, journalist, and children's book author. Life Van Loon was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, the son of Hendrik Willem van Loon and Elisabeth Johanna Hanken. He immigrated to the United States in 1902 to study at Harvard University and then Cornell University, where he received his AB in 1905. In 1906 he married Eliza Ingersoll Bowditch , daughter of a Harvard professor, by whom he had two sons, Henry Bowditch and Gerard Willem. The newlyweds moved to Germany, where van Loon received his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1911 with a dissertation that became his first book, The Fall of the Dutch Republic .

#7941

Ernesto Buonaiuti

1881 - 1946 (65 years)

Ernesto Buonaiuti was an Italian historian, philosopher of religion, Catholic priest and anti-fascist. He lost his chair at the University of Rome owing to his opposition to the Fascists. As a scholar in History of Christianity and religious philosophy he was one of the most important exponents of the modernist current.

#7942

Frank Heywood Hodder

Frank Heywood Hodder

1860 - 1935 (75 years)

Frank Heywood Hodder was an American historian and a professor first at Cornell University and later at the University of Kansas. Biography Hodder took his degrees from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1883, studying under Charles Kendall Adams. He then served in the Federal government at Washington, D.C., through 1885. Hodder later studied in Germany at the universities of Göttingen and Freiburg, 1890-1891 and took a full professorship at Kansas in the early 1890s, and was elevated the chairman of the History Department in 1908. Hodder was a member of the Organization of America...

#7943

Bogusław Leśnodorski

Bogusław Leśnodorski

1914 - 1985 (71 years)

Bogusław Leśnodorski was a Polish historian, professor of the University of Warsaw and author of many books and articles. He was editor of "Kwartalnik Historyczny" from 1953 to 1974. Further reading Anna Rosner: Bogusław Leśnodorski. In: Profesorowie Wydziału Prawa i Administracji Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 1808-2008. Grażyna Bałtruszajtys . Wyd. 1. Warszawa: Lexis-Nexis, 2008, s. 267-269. .

#7944

Nicholas Adontz

Nicholas Adontz

1871 - 1942 (71 years)

Nicholas Adontz was an Armenian historian, specialising in Byzantine and Armenian studies, and a philologist. Adontz was the author of Armenia in the Period of Justinian, a highly influential work and landmark study on the social and political structures of early Medieval Armenia.

#7945

Furio Jesi

1941 - 1980 (39 years)

Furio Jesi was an Italian historian, writer, archaeologist, and philosopher. Biography The only son of "war hero" Bruno Jesi, Furio Jesi was an independent scholar of myth, Egyptology, history of Mediterranean religions, philology and archeology, most notable for his work on extending the ideas of Károly Kerényi including studies of the science of myth and the difference between classic Myths and "Technified Myths".

#7946

Boris Porshnev

1905 - 1972 (67 years)

Boris Fyodorovich Porshnev was a Soviet historian known for his works on popular revolts in Ancien Régime France and a doctor of social sciences working on psychology, prehistory, and neurolinguistics as relating to the origins of man.

#7947

Joseph Vogt

1895 - 1986 (91 years)

Joseph Vogt was a German classical historian, one of the leading 20th-century experts on Roman history. Following his studies at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin, he earned his doctorate in history in 1921 and his Habilitation in 1923. Subsequently he became Professor of Classical History at the University of Tübingen. He was Professor at the universities of Würzburg , Breslau , Tübingen and Freiburg im Breisgau , before he returned to Tübingen again in 1946 and taught there until his retirement in 1963.

#7948

Hernán Ramírez Necochea

1917 - 1979 (62 years)

Hernán Ramírez Necochea was a Chilean Marxist historian. In 1968 he became director of the faculty of Philosophy and Education in the University of Chile. Following the 1973 Chilean coup d'etat he went to exile in Paris, France where he lectured in the Paris-Sorbonne University.

#7949

Pinkhos Churgin

1894 - 1957 (63 years)

Pinkhos Churgin was an Israeli scholar who was the first President of Bar-Ilan University. Biography Churgin was born in Pohost, Belorussia, a shtetl near Pinsk. In 1907 he and his parents immigrated to Palestine, and settled in Jerusalem. In 1910 he went to study at the Volozhin Yeshiva. Churgin returned to Palestine in 1912. In 1915 he went to the United States and taught Hebrew. He studied as an undergraduate at Clark College, and then at Yale University, earning a Ph.D. in the field of Semitics, as a student of the famous researcher Charles C. Torrey. His dissertation, "Targum Jonathan to the Prophets", was published by Yale in 1927 and has since become a classic.

#7950

Jan Zawidzki

1866 - 1928 (62 years)

Jan Wiktor Tomasz Zawidzki was a Polish physical chemist and historian of chemistry. He researched mainly chemical kinetics, thermochemistry and autocatalysis. Zawidzki was a professor of the Akademia Rolnicza in Dublany , Jagiellonian University , University of Warsaw , rector of the University of Warsaw , member of the Academy of Learning , co-founder of the Polish Chemical Society and magazine Roczniki Chemii.

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