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.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in History,
#8051
Serge Aleksandrovich Zenkovsky
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Serge Aleksandrovich Zenkovsky was a Russian historian, expatriate in the United States since 1949. He specialized in Economic, Eastern European and Central Asian history. Life Europe Zenkovsky was born on 16 June 1907 in Kiev. His father Aleksandr was a professor of economics, his mother Elena the daughter of a physician and professor of surgery; he also had a sister, Nadezhda. After the Russian Revolution, the family fled first to Constantinople, then Berlin and Prague, where Zenkovsky graduated in economic history. He then left his family in Prague to move to Paris, where his uncle Vasilii Vasilievich Zenkovsky lived.
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Robert Seton-Watson
1879 - 1951 (72 years)
Robert William Seton-Watson , commonly referred to as R. W. Seton-Watson and also known by the pseudonym Scotus Viator, was a British political activist and historian who played an active role in encouraging the breakup of Austria-Hungary and the emergence of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia during and after the First World War.
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Laurence M. Larson
1868 - 1938 (70 years)
Laurence Marcellus Larson was a Norwegian born, American educator, historian, writer and translator. His notable works included his translation from Old Norse of Konungs skuggsjá. Biography Laurence Larson was born at Bergen in Hordaland, Norway. He was the son of Christian Spjutoy Larson and Ellen Mathilde Larson . He emigrated to the United States with his family in May 1870. He studied at Drake University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Larson was appointed to the UW faculty as a Scandinavian languages and history professor on April 17, 1906, but resigned later that year, on June 27.
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Dixon Ryan Fox
1887 - 1945 (58 years)
Dixon Ryan Fox was an American educator, researcher, and president of Union College, New York from 1934 until his death in 1945. Fox graduated from Columbia College in 1911. He took his Ph.D in history at Columbia University where he was influenced by James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard and Herbert L. Osgood. He married Osgood's daughter and taught at Columbia from 1912 to the mid-1930s.
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Hector Menteith Robertson
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Hector Menteith Robertson was an economic historian who held the positions of Jagger Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town and president of the Economic Society of South Africa . He was also an editor and frequent contributor to the South African Journal of Economics.
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John E. Stambaugh
1939 - 1990 (51 years)
John Evan Stambaugh was an American classical scholar and professor at Williams College. Stambaugh was educated at Trinity College and then at Princeton University, earning a Ph.D. in 1967. Stambaugh taught at Williams from 1965 until 1990 and was a specialist in the field of Greco-Roman religion as well as early Christianity. In addition to teaching at Williams, Stambaugh was a fellow of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. and a faculty and managing committee member and chair of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, Italy.
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Marcus Jernegan
1872 - 1949 (77 years)
Marcus Wilson Jernegan was an American historian and a professor at the University of Chicago. In 2017, a scholar from Harvard referred to him as one of the leading historians of his time who influenced textbooks of his era and noted the tainted and bigoted sources he relied on.
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Helen Cam
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Helen Maud Cam, was an English historian of the Middle Ages, and the first woman to be appointed a tenured professor at Harvard University. Life and career Cam was born at Abingdon, Berkshire . Educated at home by her father William Herbert Cam, the headmaster of Abingdon School, she did her undergraduate degree at Royal Holloway College gaining a First in History there, and later an MA in Anglo-Saxon and Frankish studies at the University of London, after a fellowship year at Bryn Mawr College This degree led to her first book, Local Government in Francia and England, 768–1034 .
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Christopher Dawson
1889 - 1970 (81 years)
Christopher Henry Dawson was an English Catholic historian, independent scholar, who wrote many books on cultural history and emphasized the necessity for Western culture to be in continuity with Christianity not to stagnate and deteriorate. Dawson has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century" and was recognized as being able to expound his thought to "Catholic and Protestant, Christian and non-Christian."
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Garrett Mattingly
1900 - 1962 (62 years)
Garrett Mattingly was a professor of European history at Columbia University who specialized in early modern diplomatic history. In 1960 he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Defeat of the Spanish Armada.
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W. L. Morton
1908 - 1980 (72 years)
William Lewis Morton was a Canadian historian who specialized in the development of the Canadian west. Along with Arthur R. M. Lower and Donald Creighton he is regarded as one of the dominant Canadian historians of his generation.
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Fawn M. Brodie
1915 - 1981 (66 years)
Fawn McKay Brodie was an American biographer and one of the first female professors of history at UCLA, who is best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History , a work of psychobiography, and No Man Knows My History , an early biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.
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Wayland Hand
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Wayland Debs Hand was an American folklorist. Biography Hand was born in New Zealand, where his parents had emigrated. A few years after his birth, the family returned to Utah, where Hand grew up. He attended the University of Utah, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees in German in 1933 and 1934. He then earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1936, writing his dissertation on German folk songs.
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Hajo Holborn
1902 - 1969 (67 years)
Hajo Holborn was a German-American historian and specialist in modern German history. Early life Hajo Holborn was born the son of Ludwig Holborn, the German physicist and "Direktor der Physikalisch-Technischen Reichsanstalt," and became a student of Friedrich Meinecke at Berlin University, where he achieved a doctor of philosophy in 1924. After establishing at Heidelberg in 1926 as lecturer in medieval and modern history, he became Privatdozent there until he was called back to Berlin as Carnegie Professor of History and International Relationships at the private Deutsche Hochschule für Politik.
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Frederick John Teggart
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Frederick John Teggart was an Irish-American historian and social scientist, known for work on the history of civilizations. Life He was born in Belfast on 9 May 1870, and was educated at Methodist College Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin. He emigrated to the United States and graduated B.A. at Stanford University in 1894. He then worked as a librarian, first at Stanford and then at the Mechanics-Mercantile Library in San Francisco.
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John Le Patourel
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
John Herbert Le Patourel was a British medieval historian and professor at the University of Leeds. Biography Le Patourel was born on 29 July 1909 in Guernsey, where his father, Herbert Augustus Le Patourel, was the procureur from 1929 to 1934. He was educated at Elizabeth College, Guernsey and Jesus College, Oxford where he obtained a BA in Modern History in 1931 followed by a DPhil. In 1939 he married Jean Bird , who became an expert in medieval ceramics and was a Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Leeds from 1967 to 1980. They had a daughter and three sons. His brother, Herbe...
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Nora K. Chadwick
1891 - 1972 (81 years)
Nora Kershaw Chadwick CBE FSA FBA was an English philologist who specialized in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Old Norse studies. Early life and education Nora Kershaw was born in Lancashire in 1891, the first daughter of James Kershaw and Emma Clara Booth, married in 1888. Nora's sister Mabel, born in 1895, converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun.
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LeRoy R. Hafen
1893 - 1985 (92 years)
LeRoy Reuben Hafen was a historian of the American West and a Latter-day Saint. For many years he was a professor of history at Brigham Young University . Biography He was born on December 8, 1893, in Bunkerville, Nevada to John George Hafen, a polygamist, and Mary Ann Stucki. He attended high school in Cedar City, Utah for two years and then at the St. George Stake Academy in St. George, Utah. It was in St. George that Hafen met his wife, Ann Woodbury. They were married on 3 September 1915 in the St. George Temple. He received his bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University. After this he taught school in Bunkerville and then was the principal of Virgin Valley High School.
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Earl Lewis
1900 - Present (126 years)
Earl Lewis is the founding director of the Center for Social Solutions and professor of history at the University of Michigan. He was president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 2013 to 2018. Before his appointment as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Lewis served for over eight years as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and as the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and African American Studies at Emory University. He was the university's first African-American provost and at the time the highest-ranking African-American administrator in the...
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Władysław Czapliński
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
Władysław Czapliński was a Polish historian, a professor of the University of Wrocław, author of many popular books about Polish history. He finished his studies at the Jagiellonian University in 1927 in the Second Polish Republic, and for the next several years he was a teacher of history. During the Second World War he took part in the underground education in Poland during World War II. After the war he moved to Wrocław, where he worked at the local university until his retirement in 1975.
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Charles Farwell Edson Jr.
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
Charles Farwell Edson Jr. was an American scholar of Ancient History. Edson was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1905 as the son of poet and musician Charles Farwell Edson and social activist and feminist Katherine Philips Edson, and the great nephew of prominent Chicago businessman John V. Farwell and Senator Charles B. Farwell. Edson received the degree of A.B. in Classics from Stanford University in 1929 . He went on to earn his Ph.D. in History at Harvard University in 1939 with a dissertation entitled “Five Studies in Macedonian History" directed by Professor William Scott Ferguson . ...
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Johannes Tropfke
1866 - 1939 (73 years)
Johannes Tropfke was a German mathematician and teacher, who is best remembered for his influential work on the history of mathematics Geschichte der Elementarmathematik, which consists of seven volumes.
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Philip Wayne Powell
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Philip Wayne Powell was an American historian specializing in the Spanish colonial history of the American Southwest. He was born in Chino, California, attended Occidental College and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his B.A. in 1936. He undertook graduate studies at Berkeley, taking Hispanic studies with Herbert I. Priestley and Herbert E. Bolton. Powell completed his Ph.D. in 1941, and joined the Army.
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Alfons Dopsch
1868 - 1953 (85 years)
Alfons Dopsch was an Austrian social and economic historian who specialised in the history of medieval Europe. He studied at Institut fur Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung and was a professor at the University of Vienna from 1898 to 1936.
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Hermann Strasburger
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
Hermann Strasburger was a German ancient historian. He was the son of the internist Julius Strasburger and grandson of the botanist Eduard Strasburger.
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John F. Benton
1931 - 1988 (57 years)
John F. Benton was the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. Education He graduated from Haverford College, with a BA in 1953, from Princeton University with an MA in 1955, and PhD in 1959. He taught at Reed College and the University of Pennsylvania.
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James Pounder Whitney
1857 - 1939 (82 years)
James Pounder Whitney was a British ecclesiastical historian. Educated at King James's Grammar School, Almondbury and Owens College, Manchester, he was a foundation scholar at King's College, Cambridge, gaining firsts in the mathematics and history triposes in 1881. A fellow of King's College, he was ordained an Anglican priest in 1895. After various clerical and teaching appointment, he was professor of ecclesiastical history at King's College London from 1908 to 1918. He was Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge from 1919 to 1939. He was joint editor of Th...
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Hubert Jedin
1900 - 1980 (80 years)
Hubert Jedin was a Catholic Church historian from Germany, whose publications specialized on the history of ecumenical councils in general and the Council of Trent in particular, on which he published a 2400-page history over the years 1951–1975.
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John Duncan Mackie
1887 - 1978 (91 years)
John Duncan Mackie CBE MC was a distinguished Scottish historian who wrote a one-volume history of Scotland and several works on early modern Scotland. Biography Born in Edinburgh, Mackie was educated at Middlesbrough High School and Jesus College, Oxford, where he took a first-class degree in history and won the Lothian Essay Prize. He was appointed as a lecturer in history at the University of St Andrews in 1909, aged 22. While at the university he introduced the subject of Scottish history into the curriculum.
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Eugene C. Barker
1874 - 1956 (82 years)
Eugene Campbell Barker was an American historian at the University of Texas, the managing director of the Texas State Historical Association, and the editor of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. He chaired the history department while soliciting gifts to the university, which he used to build a collection of archives and artifacts. In 1950, the university dedicated the Eugene C. Barker History Center as a repository for his collections. These collections are an important part of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas.
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Heinz Politzer
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Heinz Politzer was an internationally recognized academic and writer. As a young man he was forced to flee Nazism first to Palestine and then to the United States, where he taught German language and literature as a professor at the Bryn Mawr College, Oberlin College, and the University of California, Berkeley. He was a literary scholar, published poet, and prominent editor, particularly of Franz Kafka. As a close associate of Kafka's protégé, Max Brod, Politzer coedited with Brod the first complete collection of Kafka's works in eight volumes, published initially by the Schocken publishing h...
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John La Nauze
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
John Andrew La Nauze was an Australian historian from Western Australia. He was born in the Goldfields town of Boulder. Shortly after his fourth birthday, his Mauritian-born father Captain Charles La Nauze was killed by Turkish artillery fire at Silt Spur Gallipoli. His mother moved the family to Perth where he attended South Perth Primary School and Perth Modern School. He completed degrees in Arts at the University of Western Australia and at Balliol College, Oxford before joining the Economics Departments at Adelaide and Sydney .
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Louise Ropes Loomis
1874 - 1958 (84 years)
Louise Ropes Loomis was an American historian, classicist, and translator. She was a professor of history at Wells College from 1921 to 1940, and editor of Classics Club Publications from the 1920s until 1949. In 1930, she co-founded the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians with Louise Fargo Brown.
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Wilhelm Dilthey
1833 - 1911 (78 years)
Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in it...
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Roger Fulford
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Sir Roger Thomas Baldwin Fulford was an English journalist, historian, writer and politician. In the 1930s, he completed the editing of the standard edition of the diaries of Charles Greville. From the 1930s to the 1960s, he wrote several important biographies and other works. Between 1964 and 1981 he edited five volumes of letters between Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal. He was President of the Liberal Party from 1964 to 1965.
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John Carl Parish
1881 - 1939 (58 years)
John Carl Parish was an American historian of American history. Parish was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He earned a degree from the Iowa State Normal School in 1902, and then from the University of Iowa in 1905. In 1908 he earned a Ph.D., also from the University of Iowa.
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Frank Card Bourne
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Frank Card Bourne was an American classicist. Life He was born on 17 July 1914. His parents were Moses Avander and Grace Winchester. He died in 1983. Career He graduated from Princeton University with his bachelor's degree in 1936 and a PhD in 1941. He was the Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin Language and Literature there from 1946 to 1976.
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Janko Lavrin
1887 - 1986 (99 years)
Janko Lavrin was a Slovene novelist, poet, critic, translator, and historian. He was Professor Andrej Jelenc DiCaprio of Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham. An enthusiast for psycho-analysis, he wrote what he called 'psycho-critical studies' of Ibsen, Nietzsche and Tolstoy.
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Cyril Falls
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Cyril Bentham Falls CBE was a 20th Century British military historian, journalist, and academic, noted for his works on the First World War. Early life Falls was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 2 March 1888, the eldest son of Sir Charles Falls, an Ulster landowner in County Tyrone. He received his formal education at the Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, and London University. At the age of 27, he published his first book, 'Rudyard Kipling: A Critical Study' .
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R. B. Merriman
1876 - 1945 (69 years)
Roger Bigelow Merriman was an American historian and a practitioner of scientific historiography developed by German historians. He is known especially for his multivolume history of the Spanish Empire.
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Werner Leibbrand
1896 - 1974 (78 years)
Werner Leibbrand was a German psychiatrist and medical historian. He showed an early talent and affection for music and languages. As a young man he considered a career as a pianist and he spoke French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Yiddish. His father however, influenced him to study medicine and philosophy. After becoming a medical doctor he specialized in psychiatry. In the crisis years around 1930 he joined Verein Sozialistischer Ärzte and co-founded a center for drug addicts. He fell into disgrace and was persecuted by the Nazis.
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Erich Bessel-Hagen
1898 - 1946 (48 years)
Erich Bessel-Hagen was a German mathematician and a historian of mathematics. Erich Paul Werner Bessel-Hagen was born in 1898 in Charlottenburg, a suburb, later a district in Berlin. He studied at the University of Berlin where in 1920 he obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics under the direction of Constantin Carathéodory.
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Maurice Séguin
1918 - 1984 (66 years)
Maurice Séguin is a Canadian historian who, along with Michel Brunet and Guy Frégault, is credited with creating the Montreal School of Canadian history.
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Carlos Castañeda
1896 - 1958 (62 years)
Carlos Castañeda was a historian, specializing in the history of Texas, and a leader in the push for civil rights for Mexican-Americans. Born in Mexico, Castañeda immigrated to the United States with his family in 1908. He gained an undergraduate and master's degree in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and then spent several years teaching Spanish at the College of William and Mary. Castañeda returned to Texas in 1927, serving as the first curator of the Latin American collection at the University of Texas. While he worked as a librarian, Castañeda pursued his doctorate in histo...
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William Reddaway
1872 - 1949 (77 years)
William Fiddian Reddaway was an academic and author in the very late 19th and early 20th centuries. Reddaway was educated at The Leys School and King's College, Cambridge. He was a Fellow of King's from 1897; and a Tutor at Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge from 1898 to 1907. He was also University Lecturer in History and Director of Scandinavian Studies; and Censor of Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge from 1907 to 1924.
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Nathan Huggins
1927 - 1989 (62 years)
Nathan Irvin Huggins was a distinguished American historian, author and educator. As a leading scholar in the field of African American studies, he was W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of History and of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University as well as director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 62.
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Robert McNutt McElroy
1872 - 1959 (87 years)
Robert McNutt McElroy was a professor of history at Princeton University. He became a jingoistic advocate of a strong national defense during World War I, working with the Republican Party and the National Security League . A popular historian in his day, he published biographies of Grover Cleveland and Jefferson Davis, and respected histories of the states of Kentucky and Texas and the conquest of the American West, none of which are much cited today.
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Ernest Gordon Rupp
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Ernest Gordon Rupp was a Methodist preacher, historian and Luther scholar. Early life and education Rupp was born on 7 January 1910 in London and attended Owen's School in Islington. He studied history at King's College London, theology at Cambridge's Wesley House, and in Strasbourg and Basel during 1936–1937.
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Edmund Curtis
1881 - 1943 (62 years)
Edmund Curtis , was born in Lancashire to Irish parents. He worked in a rubber factory until he was 15 when he continued with his education. His education was paid for through donations when it was heard that poems he had published when he was 14 and later in London in June 1896 were from a factory worker.
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Leo Santifaller
1890 - 1974 (84 years)
Leo Santifaller was an Austrian historian of South Tyrolean origin. He was director-general of the National Archives of Austria. Santifaller was director of the Bolzano State Archives , professor at the University of Breslau and at the University of Vienna , head of the Institute for Austrian Historical Research , General Director of the Austrian State Archives , Director of the Austrian Cultural Institute in Rome , founder of specialist journals, honorary doctorate at four universities and member of numerous scientific organizations such as the Austrian Academy of Sciences .
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