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.
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List of the most influential people in History,
#7951
Nicolaas Godfried van Kampen
1776 - 1839 (63 years)
Nicolaas Godfried van Kampen was a Dutch Mennonite author and deacon. While never university educated, he studied literature and history and published a large number of writings, including a history of the French domination of Europe . In 1829 he was called to teach Dutch literature and history at the Athenaeum of Amsterdam.
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D. K. Wilgus
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Donald Knight Wilgus was an American folk song scholar and academic, most recognized for chronicling 'Hillbilly', blues music and Irish-American song and his contribution to ballad scholarship. Early life and education Wilgus was born on December 1, 1918, at West Mansfield, Logan County, Ohio, and attended East High School and obtained his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Ohio State University.
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Karl Werner
1821 - 1888 (67 years)
Karl Werner was an Austrian theologian. Works In the second half of nineteenth century, he published monographs related to the doctrines of the great doctors of the medieval and 16th century scholastic. The monographs addressed the thought of, among others, Roger Bacon, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Francisco Suarez.
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François Baudouin
1520 - 1573 (53 years)
François Baudouin , also called Balduinus, was a French jurist, Christian controversialist and historian. Among the most colourful of the noted French humanists, he was respected by his contemporaries as a statesman and jurist, even as they frowned upon his perceived inconstancy in matters of faith: he was noted as a Calvinist who converted to Catholicism.
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Stanislas Bormans
1835 - 1912 (77 years)
Stanislas Marie Bormans was a Belgian archivist and historian. Life Bormans was born in Hasselt on 2 February 1835. When he was a few months old, his father, Jean-Henri Bormans, was appointed a professor at the University of Ghent. Two years later he transferred to the University of Liège.
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Richard Millman
1932 - 1983 (51 years)
Richard Millman was an American historian at the University of Illinois. Millman was appointed instructor at Temple University for 1960–1961. His 1979 work on Benjamin Disraeli's policy during the Great Eastern Crisis of 1875–78 was called the "authoritative account" by M. R. D. Foot and a "masterly achievement" by John Vincent. According to Richard Shannon, Millman "challenges the Seton-Watsonian tradition and boldly essays to restore the credibility of Disraeli's attempt to reassert the Palmerstonian tradition of maintaining the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire as a capital...
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Tache Papahagi
1892 - 1977 (85 years)
Tache Papahagi was an Aromanian folklorist and linguist. He was born into an Aromanian family in Avdella , a village that formed part of the Ottoman Empire's Manastir Vilayet and is now in Greece. He attended primary school in his native village, followed from 1902 to 1912 by studies at the Romanian high schools in Ioannina and Bitola. From 1912 to 1916, he went to the literature and philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest in Romania. In 1925, he obtained a doctorate in philology from the same institution; his thesis dealt with the Maramureș dialect and folklore. He was a high school teacher at Târgu Neamț from 1916 to 1918.
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Herbert Krause
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
Herbert Arthur Krause was an American historian, author and college professor. He was born and educated in Minnesota and South Dakota, where he taught and wrote. He was the author of novels, plays, poems, essays, and reviews. He also worked towards preservation of cultural heritage.
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Karl Helm
1871 - 1960 (89 years)
Karl Helm was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies Biography Karl Helm was born in Karlsruhe, Germany on 19 May 1871. He studied German philology in Heidelberg and Freiburg, earning his doctorate in 1895 with a study on 16th-century poetry.
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James Hight
1870 - 1958 (88 years)
Sir James Hight was a New Zealand university professor, educational administrator and historian. He was born in Halswell in Christchurch, New Zealand on 3 November 1870. He died on 17 May 1958 and is buried at Linwood Cemetery.
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Anatol Lewicki
1841 - 1899 (58 years)
Anatol Lewicki was a Polish historian. Anatol Lewicki was son of Grzegorz Lewicki, Greek-Catholic provost in Prysowce. He was buried at the Rakowicki Cemetery in Kraków. Footnotes External links
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Gerard Geldenhouwer
1482 - 1542 (60 years)
Gerardus Geldenhouwer was a Dutch historian and Protestant reformer. Geldenhouwer descended from a patrician family of Nijmegen, where he was born. His father, also named Gerard, was chamberservant at the court of Arnold of Egmond and Adolf of Egmond, dukes of Guelders. He followed an education at the Latin school in Deventer, before he joined the Augustinians. After this he studied at Leuven. Here he wrote his first publications, amongst which are a collection of Satires in the trend of Erasmus' Praise of Folly. In this period he also oversaw the printing of several works of Erasmus and Thom...
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Pieter Lodewijk Muller
1842 - 1904 (62 years)
Pieter Lodewijk Muller was a Dutch historian. He published numerous works of history and also contributed nearly two hundred entries to the German Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie . Life Muller was born in Koog aan de Zaan , the third son of Christiaan Muller and Isabella Muller de Cercq . Christiaan Muller was a Mennonite preacher in Koog aan de Zaan and Zaandijk. His mother, who came from a prosperous Dutch family, died when he was only two. The Muller name, written in older documents as Müller, reflected the family's German provenance. Pieter's grandfather, Samuel, and his great uncle, Johannes, had relocated around 1800 from Krefeld to Amsterdam to set up a bookshop.
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Paulus Merula
1558 - 1607 (49 years)
Paulus Merula, or Paul van Merle was a Dutch jurist, classicist, historian, geographer and librarian. In 1592 he was appointed professor of history at Leiden University, and was elevated to full professor in 1593. From 1597 until his death he was librarian to Leiden University Library, and in 1603 he was appointed rector magnificus of the university. He was friends with Janus Dousa and Daniël Heinsius, and was a Leiden contemporary of the humanist Joseph Justus Scaliger.
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Annette Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven
1909 - 1989 (80 years)
Annette Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven was an Irish historian specialising in medieval Irish history, and was among the earliest female academics appointed in Trinity College Dublin. Family Otway-Ruthven was the daughter of Captain Robert Mervyn Bermingham Otway-Ruthven , Royal Artillery, of Castle Otway, County Tipperary, and Margaret Casement , of Cronroe, County Wicklow. She had three sisters and a brother; two of her sisters died young. Through her mother Otway-Ruthven was related to Roger Casement.
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Carlo Malagola
1855 - 1910 (55 years)
Carlo Malagola was a 19th-century Italian historian. Among others, he studied the archives of Bologna, and the life of Antonio Urceo , called Codro , who had taught Greek to Nicolaus Copernicus. Malagola discovered that according to the note Dominus Nicolaus Kopperlingk de Thorn - IX grossetos the young Prussian had enrolled in the Acta nationis Germanorum at Bologna in 1496 for the fee of 9 Groschen.
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Émile Gebhart
1839 - 1908 (69 years)
Émile Gebhart was a French academic and writer, He was elected to the Académie Française in 1905. He was attacked by Radicals for his religious and patriotic ideals. Life He was the grand-nephew of General Drouot. Having finished his studies in the lycée of Nancy, he was admitted to the École Française of Athens, where he researched future works. When he returned to France he was sent to the lycée of Nice and soon after appointed professor of foreign literature in the University of Nancy.
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Jean de Serres
1540 - 1598 (58 years)
Jean de Serres was a major French historian and an advisor to King Henry IV during the Wars of Religion that marred the French Reformation in the second half of the Sixteenth Century. As a refugee from religious persecution, he was educated in Switzerland and became a Calvinist pastor, humanist, poet, polemicist, and diplomat. His complete translation of Plato appeared in the famous 1578 edition published by Henri Estienne, which is the source of the standard 'Stephanus numbers' still used by scholars to refer to Plato's works. In 1596, de Serres was appointed 'Historian of France' by King Henry IV.
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Niels Krag
1568 - 1602 (34 years)
Niels Krag , was a Danish academic and diplomat. Krag was a Doctor of Divinity, Professor at the University of Copenhagen, and historiographer Royal. Mission to Scotland In August 1589 the Danish council decided that Peder Munk, Breide Rantzau, Dr Paul Knibbe, and Niels Krag would accompany Anne of Denmark, the bride of James VI, to Scotland. After several mishaps, poor weather, and "contrary winds" they decided to stay at Oslo over the winter.
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Stanisław Zakrzewski
1873 - 1936 (63 years)
Stanisław Zakrzewski was a Polish historian. He was a professor of Lviv University , member of Polish Academy of Learning , chairman of Polish Historical Society , senator from Non-partisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government . Zakrzewski was associated with National Democracy, then with Józef Piłsudski.
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Aage Skavlan
1847 - 1920 (73 years)
Aage Gerhard Skavlan was a Norwegian historian. He was born in Herøy as a son of dean Aage Schavland and his wife Gerhardine Pauline Bergh . He was a great-grandnephew of vicar Jacob Schavland, nephew of vicar Gerhard B. Bergh and a brother of Sigvald Skavlan, Einar Skavlan, Sr., Olaf Skavlan and Harald Skavlan.
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Elizabeth Hamer Kegan
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Elizabeth "Betty" Edwards Hamer Kegan was an American archivist and librarian, and served as the Assistant Librarian of Congress from 1963 to 1978. She was a founding member of the Society of American Archivists in 1936 and was President of SAA from 1975-1976.
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Paul Petit
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Paul Petit was a 20th-century French historian, a specialist in ancient Rome. He was a professor at the University of Grenoble. Paul Petit's books covered a multitude of issues in relation to Rome and the , For example, in his book Histoire générale de l'Empire romain, pages 178–179, he dealt with the Cursus honorum of a senator's son.
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Jean Meuvret
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Jean Meuvret was a historian of early modern France. He was a tutor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and was known in Europe and America for his pioneering studies of the French economy in the seventeenth century. His most important work, Le problème des subsistances á l'époque de Louis XIV, examines the corn economy of France during the Old Regime. Meuvret was interested in showing how historical conditions affected different networks of exchange in an early monetary economy.
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Fotios Malleros
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
Fotios Malleros Kasimatis was a Greek historian, philologist and scholar specialist in Byzantinology. His academic career was mainly developed in Chile. Biography He studied at University of Athens, graduating there as a philologist and historian. Juan Gómez Millas, a Chilean politician then Universidad de Chile Faculty of Philosophy and Letters Dean, arrived his country in 1947. Initially he taught there, at the Pedagogical Institute, teaching courses on Greek language, history and literature. Although in Chile there was already, since colonial times, a remarkable academic dedication around ...
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Kristen Valkner
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Kristen Nikolai Valkner was a Norwegian priest and church historian. He was born in Bergen, and graduated with the cand.theol. degree in 1927. He was appointed vicar in Skånevik in 1928, but returned to academia as he became docent in church history at the University of Oslo in 1946. He was promoted to professor in 1964, and retired in 1972. Notable books include Norges kirkehistorie 1500–1800 , Mesteren fra Møre and Kirkestriden i Norge. Belyst ved Lyder Bruns brev til F. C. Krarup 1905–1931 .
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John Gregg
1873 - 1961 (88 years)
John Allen Fitzgerald Gregg CH was a Church of Ireland clergyman, from 1915 Bishop of Ossory, Ferns and Leighlin, in 1920 translated to become Archbishop of Dublin, and finally from 1939 until 1959 Archbishop of Armagh. He was also a theologian and historian.
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Franciscus Haraeus
1555 - 1631 (76 years)
Franciscus Haraeus , , was a theologian, historian, and cartographer from the Low Countries. He is best known for his history of the origins of the Dutch Revolt, written from a Catholic perspective but without polemical bias. He was one of the first cartographers to make thematic maps and globes.
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Theodore S. Parvin
1817 - 1901 (84 years)
Theodore Sutton Parvin was born on the 15th of January, 1817, in Cumberland County, New Jersey. In 1833 he graduated at Woodworth College, Ohio, and began the study of law, graduating at the Cincinnati Law School in 1837. In 1838 Robert Lucas, who had been appointed Governor of the new Territory of Iowa, selected Mr. Parvin for his private secretary. He accompanied the Governor to Burlington where he was appointed to take charge of the Territorial library. In 1839 Mr. Parvin was appointed District Attorney of the middle District and removed to Bloomington. He served three terms as probate judge.
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António Garcia Ribeiro de Vasconcelos
1860 - 1941 (81 years)
António Garcia Ribeiro de Vasconcelos was a Portuguese historian and theologian. He taught at the University of Coimbra from 1887 to 1930, first in the Faculty of Theology and then in the Faculty of Letters, which appointed him Emeritus Professor. In 1936 he became the first president of the Portuguese Academy of History.
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Heinrich Liebmann
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Karl Otto Heinrich Liebmann was a German mathematician and geometer. Life Liebmann was the son of Otto Liebmann , a Jewish neo-Kantian philosophy professor in Jena. Heinrich studied from 1895 to 1897 at the universities Leipzig, Jena and Göttingen. In 1895 he was awarded the doctorate under Carl Johannes Thomae with the subject Die einzweideutigen projektiven Punktverwandtschaften der Ebene and passed the Lehramtsprüfung in 1896. In 1897 he was an assistant in Göttingen and in 1898 in Leipzig, where he was habilitated on the subject Über die Verbiegung der geschlossenen Flächen positiver Krümmung.
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Gloria Griffen Cline
1929 - 1973 (44 years)
Gloria Griffen Cline was an American historian of the Great Basin and professor at Sacramento State College. Biography She was born in San Francisco to parents Robert A. and Grace G. Griffen. In 1931 the Griffens moved to Reno, Nevada, where Gloria attended local grammar schools and Reno High School, graduating in 1947. She received her BA and MA in history from the University of Nevada in 1951, before going on to complete her Ph.D. in history at the University of California in 1958. She adapted her dissertation into the book Exploring the Great Basin .
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Peter Friedrich Arpe
1682 - 1740 (58 years)
Peter Friedrich Arpe was a German lawyer, historian and legal writer. He was also the founder of a huge collection of objects and manuscripts on the history of Schleswig-Holstein, though his collection also included banned theological works. He also wrote and collected under the Latinised form of his name, Petrus Fridericus Arpius.
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Anna Dean Kepper
1938 - 1983 (45 years)
Anna Dean Kepper was a historian and a curator of Nevada history and the history of Las Vegas who helped save historic structures in that city. Early life and education Born in Seattle, Washington, Kepper received master's degrees in both museology and American folk culture from the State University of New York at Oneonta. She earned a third master's degree in public administration from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas after moving to Las Vegas in 1973.
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Louise Brown
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
Louise Brown was an American historian of Britain. Early life Louise Fargo Brown was born in 1878 in Buffalo, New York and received her B.A. from Cornell University in 1903. She was a member of Alpha Phi Women's Fraternity.
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Dominicus Baudius
1561 - 1613 (52 years)
Dominicus Baudius, a Latinised form of Dominique Baudier, was a French Neo-Latin poet, scholar and historian. From 1603 to 1613 he was a teacher at the University of Leiden. Life Baudius was born in a calvinistic family in the Southern Netherlands in Lille. His original name was probably Dominique Baudier, though sources only show his Latinised name Dominicus Baudius. As a result of the arrival of the new regent of the low countries, the Duke of Alba in 1568, Baudius moved to Aachen along with his parents and sister. After finishing at the local school he proceeded to study theology first in Leiden from 1578 to 1579 and then in Geneva in 1581.
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Adolf Leschnitzer
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Adolf Leschnitzer was a German-American writer-researcher, historian and teacher, specialising in Jewish and German studies. Biography Adolf Friedrich Leschnitzer was born in Posen before 19451864–1934secondary schoolsecondary school
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David Chytraeus
1531 - 1600 (69 years)
David Chytraeus or Chyträus was a German Lutheran theologian, reformer and historian. He was a disciple of Melancthon. He was born at Ingelfingen. His real surname was Kochhafe, which in Classical Greek is χύτρα, from where he derived the Latinized pseudonym "Chyträus".
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Heriger of Lobbes
925 - 1007 (82 years)
Herigerus was a Benedictine monk, often known as Heriger of Lobbes for serving as abbot of the abbey of Lobbes between 990 and 1007. Remembered for his writings as theologian and historian, Herigerus was a teacher to numerous scholars. His biography describes him as "skilled in the art of music", though no music theory treatise survives and neither do the two antiphons and one hymn attributed to him.
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A. C. F. Beales
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
Arthur Charles Frederick Beales was an historian. He was educated at King's College London, where his mentors included F. J. C. Hearnshaw and Eileen Power. Beales spent all but four years of his career at King's; for three years he was a schoolmaster and he worked for University College, Swansea, for a year. From 1964 until his retirement in 1972 he was Professor of History at King's. In 1935 he converted to Catholicism.
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Patrick Cumming
1741 - 1820 (79 years)
Patrick Cumming FRSE was a professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Glasgow, philologist and joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was, at that time, the longest served of any known Scottish professor.
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Albert T. Olmstead
1880 - 1945 (65 years)
Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead was an American historian and academic, who specialized in Assyriology. Olmstead was born in 1880 in New York, and died in 1945 in Chicago. He was Professor of Oriental History at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Among his doctoral students was Neilson C. Debevoise, later an influential historian of the Parthian Empire.
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Friedrich Uhlhorn
1894 - 1978 (84 years)
Friedrich Uhlhorn was an honorary professor at the Philipps-Universität Marburg, whose scientific focus was on the history of the State of Hesse and was also known for his work outside Hesse. His special scientific interest was mainly focused on the problems of historical cartography. In collaboration with Edmund Ernst Stengel, he published the Geschichtlichen Atlas von Hessen, which is considered his major work. He also wrote the article Die deutschen Territorien. A: The West, which deals with the West German regional history. Likewise he was responsible as editor for the by Bruno Gebhardt.
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Philip Taft
1902 - 1976 (74 years)
Philip Taft was an American labor historian whose research focused on the labor history of the United States and the American Federation of Labor. Early life Taft was born on March 22, 1902, in Syracuse, New York. His father died when he was still a young boy. His mother moved the family to New York City, where she took up work as a house cleaner.
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Irving A. Leonard
1896 - 1996 (100 years)
Irving Albert Leonard was an American historian and translator, specializing in Hispanic history and art. His best known publications are Books of the Brave and Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-Century Persons, Places and Practices , which won the Conference on Latin American History award for the best book in English. Books of the Brave, a valuable account of the introduction of literary culture to Spain's New World, was updated in 1992. He had many papers published in the American Historical Review and the Hispanic American Historical Review, such as A Frontier Library, 1799 .
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N. S. B. Gras
1884 - 1956 (72 years)
Norman Scott Brien Gras , known as N. S. B. Gras, was a Canadian professor at the Harvard Business School who invented the academic discipline of business history. Early life Gras was born in 1884 in Toronto, Ontario. He graduated from the University of Western Ontario. He went on to receive a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
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Marc Bloch
1886 - 1944 (58 years)
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg , the University of Paris , and the University of Montpellier .
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William Bascom
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
William R. Bascom was an award-winning American folklorist, anthropologist, and museum director. He was a specialist in the art and culture of West Africa and the African Diaspora, especially the Yoruba of Nigeria.
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Allan Nevins
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Joseph Allan Nevins was an American historian and journalist, known for his extensive work on the history of the Civil War and his biographies of such figures as Grover Cleveland, Hamilton Fish, Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller, as well as his public service. He was a leading exponent of business history and oral history.
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Merle Curti
1897 - 1996 (99 years)
Merle Eugene Curti was an American progressive historian who influenced peace studies, intellectual history and social history, including by using cliometrics . At Columbia University and for decades at the University of Wisconsin, Curti directed 86 finished Ph.D. dissertations and had a wide range of correspondents. He was known for his commitment to democracy, as well as the Turnerian thesis that social and economic forces shape American life, thought and character.
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