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,
#8001
Frances Yates
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Dame Frances Amelia Yates was an English historian of the Renaissance, who wrote books on the history of esotericism. After attaining an MA in French at University College London, she began to publish her research in scholarly journals and academic books, focusing on 16th-century theatre and the life of the linguist and lexicographer John Florio. In 1941, she was employed by the Warburg Institute in London, and began to work on what she termed "Warburgian history", emphasising a pan-European and inter-disciplinary approach to historiography.
Go to Profile#8002
Stanley Pargellis
1898 - 1968 (70 years)
Stanley McCrory Pargellis was an American historian and librarian. His work as a historian focused mainly on the military history of the American colonial era. From 1942 to 1962, he was director of the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Go to Profile#8003
Michael Crowder
1934 - 1988 (54 years)
Michael Crowder was a British historian and author notable for his books on the history of Africa and particularly on the history of West Africa. Early life and education Michael was born in London and educated at Mill Hill School. After earning a first class honours degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Hertford College, Oxford in 1957, he returned to Lagos to become first Editor of Nigeria Magazine in 1959.
Go to Profile#8004
Sydney Checkland
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
Sydney George Checkland FRSE was a British-Canadian economic historian. Life Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Checkland worked at the Bank of Nova Scotia, then the Ottawa Sanitary Laundry Company, while he gained associate membership of the Canadian Bankers' Association. In 1938, he moved to England to study at the University of Birmingham, and in his final year served as President of the Guild of Students at the university. In 1941, he was elected as President of the National Union of Students, serving for only one year before becoming President of the International Council of Students.
Go to Profile#8005
William Linn Westermann
1873 - 1954 (81 years)
William Linn Westermann was an American historian and papyrologist who served as the president of the American Historical Association in 1944. He was regarded as an expert on the economy of the ancient world.
Go to Profile#8006
Albert Howe Lybyer
1879 - 1949 (70 years)
Albert Howe Lybyer was a scholar of the history of the Middle East and the Balkans. Lybyer taught medieval and modern European history at Oberlin College from 1909 to 1913, and also held teaching positions at Robert College of Istanbul , Harvard University and the University of Illinois . He served as a technical advisor to the King–Crane Commission in 1919.
Go to Profile#8007
Joseph Ward Swain
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
#8008
Michael Flinn
1917 - 1983 (66 years)
Michael Walter Flinn was a British economic historian. Born into a middle-class family in Chorlton-on-Medlock, he was educated at William Hulme's Grammar School in Manchester, serving as an officer in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War. After the end of the war, Flinn took a history degree at the University of Manchester before spending two years as a grammar school teacher while writing a postgraduate dissertation in his spare time. In 1959, he began lecturing at the University of Edinburgh, writing an introductory school textbook for history in 1961, which was still in print at his death.
Go to Profile#8009
Conyers Read
1881 - 1959 (78 years)
Conyers Read was an American historian who specialized in the History of England in the 15th and 16th centuries. A professor of history at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, he was president of the American Historical Association for the year 1949–1950.
Go to Profile#8010
J. P. V. D. Balsdon
1901 - 1977 (76 years)
John Percy Vyvian Dacre Balsdon, FBA , known as J. P. V. D. Balsdon in his academic work and otherwise as Dacre Balsdon, was an English ancient historian and writer. He was a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, from 1927 to 1969, and president of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies from 1968 to 1971.
Go to Profile#8011
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.
Go to Profile#8012
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.
Go to Profile#8013
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.
Go to Profile#8014
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.
Go to Profile#8015
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.
Go to Profile#8016
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.
Go to Profile#8017
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.
Go to Profile#8018
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.
Go to Profile#8019
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.
Go to Profile#8020
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...
Go to Profile#8021
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.
Go to Profile#8022
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.
Go to Profile#8023
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.
Go to Profile#8024
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 ...
Go to Profile#8025
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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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.
Go to Profile#8027
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.
Go to Profile#8028
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.
Go to Profile#8029
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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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.
Go to Profile#8031
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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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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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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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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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 .
Go to Profile#8036
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.
Go to Profile#8037
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.
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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.
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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 ...
Go to Profile#8040
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.
Go to Profile#8041
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.
Go to Profile#8042
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.
Go to Profile#8043
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.
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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.
Go to Profile#8045
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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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