The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in History,
#8151
Rollin G. Osterweis
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Rollin G. Osterweis was an American historian in the Department of History at Yale University for twenty eight years while also serving as the Yale Director of Debating and Public Speaking. Osterweis was the author of numerous books and articles focused on the history of the American South and on New Haven, Connecticut.
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Franz Maria Feldhaus
1874 - 1957 (83 years)
Franz Maria Feldhaus was a German engineer, historian of science, and scientific writer. He was known in the late 1950s as "Germany's most well-known and most prolific writer on the history of technology."
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Michel Brunet
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Michel Brunet was a Quebec historian and essayist. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the Université de Montréal and received his Ph.D. from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.A. He was chair of the history department at the Université de Montréal from 1959 to 1968. Before becoming an academic, he worked for several years as a schoolteacher. Together with fellow Université de Montreal professors Guy Frégault and Maurice Séguin, he formed part of the "Montreal School" of French-Canadian history.
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Nellie Neilson
1873 - 1947 (74 years)
Nellie Neilson was an American historian. She was the first female president of the American Historical Association and the first woman to have an article published in the American Historical Review.
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Margaret Atwood Judson
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Margaret Atwood Judson was an American historian and writer. Judson was born in Winsted, Connecticut on November 5, 1899. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1922 before attending Radcliffe College where she completed an M.A. in 1923 and her Ph.D. in 1933.
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Annie Heloise Abel
1873 - 1947 (74 years)
Annie Heloise Abel was among the earliest professional historians to study Native Americans. She was one of the first thirty women in the United States to earn a PhD in history. One of the ablest historians of her day, Abel was an expert on the history of British and American Indian policies. As another historian has put it: "She was the first academically trained historian in the United States to consider the development of Indian-white relations and, although her focus was narrowly political and her methodology almost entirely archival-based, in this she was a pioneer."
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Eleanor Duckett
1880 - 1976 (96 years)
Eleanor Shipley Duckett was an English-born philologist and medieval historian who spent most of her career in the United States. For thirty years, she taught at Smith College . Duckett published a number of books with University of Michigan Press, mainly on European history, religious history, and saints, and was a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. Initially, Duckett was known for writing accessible historical books on the Middle Ages; later, she acquired a reputation as an authority on early medieval saints. A devout Episcopalian, Duckett was the lifelong companion of novelist Ma...
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Evelyn Jamison
1877 - 1972 (95 years)
Evelyn Mary Jamison was a British medievalist who devoted herself mainly to the study of the history of the Normans in Sicily. She was vice-principal and tutor of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford from 1921 to 1937.
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Rudolf Kötzschke
1867 - 1949 (82 years)
Rudolf Kötzschke was a German historian who founded the Seminar for Regional History and Settlement Studies in Leipzig, the first regional history institution at a German university. Life and career Born in Dresden, Kötzschke was the son of the "royal Saxon chamber musician" Hermann Kötzschke and older brother of the historian Paul Richard Kötzschke . He attended Gelinek's public school and from 1877 to 1885 the Kreuzschule in Dresden. From 1886 to 1889, he studied at the University of Leipzig, majoring in Latin and history and minoring in German, geography, Sanskrit and Ancient Greek; in the summer of 1887, he studied for a semester at the University of Tübingen.
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Susan Tucker
Susan Tucker is an American archivist. She was the Curator of Books and Records for the Newcomb Archives and Vorhoff Library at Newcomb College of Tulane University for over 30 years. She retired in 2015. She is a longtime member of the Society of American Archivists and is active in the Women's Collection Roundtable. She is now an archival consultant specializing in genealogy and family records.
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Johannes Hoops
1865 - 1949 (84 years)
Johannes Hoops was a German philologist who was Professor of English philology at the University of Heidelberg. He is best known as the publisher of the first edition of the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde .
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Nora Levin
1916 - 1989 (73 years)
Nora Levin was a historian of the Holocaust and a writer. She was most interested in the topics of the Jewish Labor Bund, social Zionists, and Jews during the Holocaust. Biography Levin was born on September 20, 1916, in Philadelphia, where she lived most of her life. She received her B.S. in education from Temple University and her M.L.S. from Drexel University. She served as the executive director of the Philadelphia Council of Pioneer Women, the women’s Labor Zionist organization from 1948 to 1953.
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Sidney Low
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Sir Sidney James Mark Low was a British journalist, historian, and essayist. Biography Low was born to Jewish parents Therese and Maximillian Loewe , who emigrated to Britain from Hungary following the 1848 uprising.
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Richard Ernest Dupuy
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Colonel Richard Ernest Dupuy was a United States Army officer and military historian. Before his National Guard artillery unit was called to serve in World War I, Dupuy was a reporter with the New York Herald. He transferred to the regular army after the war, serving in a number of public relations roles. During World War II, Dupuy served as acting director of public relations at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, under General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1944, on D-Day, Dupuy was the first to announce on radio that the invasion of Normandy was taking place. He was also present fo...
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Chester W. New
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Chester William New, FRSC was a Canadian historian, known for his biographies of Lord Durham and Henry Brougham. New was educated at the University of Toronto, McMaster University, and the University of Chicago, having also been ordained a Baptist minister before his graduate studies. He taught at Brandon College from 1913 and McMaster University from 1920 to 1950, where he was Professor of History and sometime head of the Department of History.
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Martin Broszat
1926 - 1989 (63 years)
Martin Broszat was a German historian specializing in modern German social history. As director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich from 1972 until his death, he became known as one of the world's most eminent scholars of Nazi Germany.
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Józef Mitkowski
1911 - 1980 (69 years)
Józef Mitkowski was a Polish historian. In 1969 he gained the title of professor. Mitkowski collaborated with the Western Institute. Publications Pomorze Zachodnie w stosunku do Polski, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Zachodniego 1946.Początki klasztoru cystersów w Sulejowie: studia nad dokumentami, fundacją i rozwojem uposażenia do końca XIII w., Poznań: nakł. Poznańskiego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk 1949.Śląsk w okresie formowania i utrwalania się państwa polskiego : do roku 1138, Opole: Instytut Śląski 1966.Kancelaria Kazimierza Konradowica, księcia kujawsko-łęczyckiego 1233-1267, Kraków: Zakład Narodowy im.
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Dieter Cunz
1910 - 1969 (59 years)
Dieter Cunz was an emigre from Nazi Germany first to Switzerland and then to the U.S. who taught German language and literature as a professor at the University of Maryland from 1939 to 1957 and at Ohio State University from 1957 until his death in 1969. He authored a number of fictional and non-fictional works.
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Walter Adams
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Sir Walter Adams was a British historian and educationalist. Adams was educated at University College London, and was a lecturer in history at the same institution from 1926 to 1934. He was a Rockefeller Fellow in the United States from 1929 to 1930, and the organising secretary of the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in 1931.
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Klaus Scholder
1930 - 1985 (55 years)
Klaus Scholder was a German ecclesiastical historian, professor of history at the University of Tübingen. Life Scholder was the son of Erlangen professor of Chemistry Rudolf Scholder. After his high school graduation, he studied Germanistics and Theology at the University of Tübingen and at Göttingen. After his academic promotion and his ordination as an evangelical pastor, he worked for the FDP's Bundestag faction. In 1958 he took up a post with the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg and at first was a parish steward at Bad Überkingen, only to move on to the Evangelical Priory of Tübingen in 1959.
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George W. F. Hallgarten
1901 - 1975 (74 years)
George W. F. Hallgarten, or Georg Wolfgang Felix Hallgarten , was a German-born American historian. Hallgarten was a student of Max Weber in the University of Munich for a short time. In 1925 he became Dr. phil. in Munich, taught by Hermann Oncken and Karl Alexander von Müller. In 1933, he moved to Paris to flee the Nazis, mainly due to his Marxist approach and his pacifist conviction, as his mother was the German pacifist Constanze Hallgarten.
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Florence Harmer
1890 - 1967 (77 years)
Florence Elizabeth Harmer FBA was an English historian, specializing in the Anglo-Saxon period. Translating from Old English and Latin, she edited a number of primary sources for early English history, and her Anglo-Saxon Writs remains a standard text.
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Adolph B. Benson
1881 - 1962 (81 years)
Adolph B. Benson, born Adolph Berndt Bengtsson, was an American scholar, educator and literary historian. Adolph Benson's research focused primarily on the study of Swedish-American culture. Biography Adolph Benson was born in Skåne, Sweden as the eldest of nine children. He emigrated to the United States during 1892 settling in Berlin, Connecticut. He graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut , . He taught at Columbia University, 1909-1911, at Dartmouth College 1911-1914 and at Sheffield Scientific School 1914-1920. In 1920, he became extraordinary professor of German and Scandinavian languages and literature at Yale University.
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Isaiah Sonne
1887 - 1960 (73 years)
Isaiah Sonne, sometimes also Isaia Sonne, was a Jewish historian and bibliographer. Born in Galicia in 1887, he was educated in Switzerland and Italy, spending much of his career in the latter country as a teacher at Jewish colleges. After the implementations of the Italian Racial Laws in 1938, Sonne migrated to the United States where he taught at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, where he died in 1960.
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Ernst Ekman
1926 - 1981 (55 years)
Ernst Ekman was a specialist in Scandinavian history at the University of California Riverside. Born in Chicago of Swedish descent, Ekman was multi-lingual, a meticulous historian, and an advocate of the benefits of a broad education in the history of Western Civilisation.
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Götz Freiherr von Pölnitz
1906 - 1967 (61 years)
Hieronymus Christoph Jan Eugen Franz Gottfried Maria Freiherr von Pölnitz, known as Götz Freiherr von Pölnitz was a German social historian, economic historian and archivist.
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F. J. C. Hearnshaw
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw was an English professor of history, specializing in medieval history. He was noted for his conservative interpretation of the past, showing an empire-oriented ideology in defence of hierarchical authority, paternalism, deference, the monarchy, Church, family, nation, status, and place. He was a Tory Democrat who sought to realize Disraeli's goal of preserving invaluable historic traditions while encouraging timely reforms. He believed that a meritocratic, small, effective elite should lead the weaker majority.
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Bill Airey
1897 - 1968 (71 years)
Willis Thomas Goodwin Airey , commonly known as Bill Airey, was a New Zealand university professor, historian and peace activist. Early life, family and education Airey was born in Auckland on 7 January 1897, three months after the death of his father, school inspector Walter Henry Airey. Walter Airey's death left his widow, Margaret, struggling to raise seven children. Willis Airey was an outstanding student at Remuera Primary School and Auckland Grammar School. In 1914 he won a scholarship to Auckland University College, where he excelled in English and Latin.
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George Matthew Dutcher
1874 - 1959 (85 years)
George Matthew Dutcher was an American historian and professor at Wesleyan University. He was born on 16 September 1874, in Pleasant Valley, New York. He received a B.A. and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, where he studied under historian George Lincoln Burr, as well as an LL.D. from Allegheny College in 1939.
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Samuel Johnson
1846 - 1901 (55 years)
The Rev. Samuel Johnson was an Anglican priest and historian of the Yoruba. Biography Samuel Johnson was born a recaptive Creole in Freetown, Sierra Leone, as the third of seven children of Henry Erugunjinmi Johnson and Sarah Johnson on June 24, 1846. His father, who gave himself the Yoruba name Erugunjinmi, was born in 1810 in the town of Oyo-Ile, capital of the Oyo Empire. Henry was an Omoba of the Oyo clan, and was a grandson of the 18th-century alaafin Abiodun. He was later captured in the Atlantic Slave Trade but fortunately was rerouted to Sierra Leone, like many Yorubas, such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther and others.
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Godefroid Kurth
1847 - 1916 (69 years)
Godefroid Kurth was a Belgian historian and pioneering Christian democrat. He is known for his histories of the city of Liège in the Middle Ages and of Belgium, his Catholic account of the formation of modern Europe in Les Origines de la civilisation moderne, and his defence of the medieval guild system.
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Ephraim Lipson
1888 - 1960 (72 years)
Ephraim Lipson, or E. Lipson was a British economic historian. The son of a Jewish furniture dealer, Lipson attended Sheffield Royal Grammar School followed by Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a First class degree in History.
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Tsiang Tingfu
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Tsiang Tingfu , was a historian and diplomat of the Republic of China who published in English under the name T.F. Tsiang. Early life and education Tsiang was born in Shaoyang, Hunan. Tsiang's education from his teenage years had been Western and largely Christian, and he converted to Christianity at 11. Having been urged to study in the US by his teacher from a missionary school, he was sent in 1911 to study in the United States, where he attended the Park Academy, Oberlin College and Columbia University. His dissertation, "Labor and Empire: A Study of the Reaction of British Labor, Mainly as...
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Hugo Obermaier
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Hugo Obermaier was a distinguished Spanish-German prehistorian and anthropologist who taught at various European centres of learning. Although he was born in Germany, he was later naturalized as a Spanish citizen in 1924. He is particularly associated with his work on the diffusion of mankind in Europe during the Ice Age, and in connection with north Spanish cave art, and resisted placing his science at the disposal of nationalistic and racialist interests in the Germany of the 1930s.
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Aldo Mieli
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
Aldo Mieli was an influential historian of science, and a pioneer of gay rights. Early life and education Born in 1879 in Livorno, Italy to a wealthy Jewish family, Mieli was raised in Chianciano, a small spa town in Tuscany, to which his family moved in 1880.
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Reginald Lane Poole
1857 - 1939 (82 years)
Reginald Lane Poole, FBA was a British historian. He was Keeper of the Archives and a lecturer in diplomatics at the University of Oxford, where he gave the Ford Lectures in 1912 on the subject of "The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century". Son of Edward Stanley Poole, the "Lane" in his surname comes from his paternal grandmother Sophia Lane Poole, author of An Englishwoman in Egypt . He was the father of Austin Lane Poole , also a historian and Ford's Lecturer; the brother of the orientalist Stanley Lane-Poole; the nephew of Reginald Stuart Poole; and the great-nephew of Edward William Lane.
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Robert Winslow Gordon
1888 - 1961 (73 years)
Robert Winslow Gordon was an American academic, known as a collector of folk songs. Gordon was educated at Harvard University. He joined the English faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 1918. In 1923, he was asked by Arthur Sullivant Hoffman to run the folk music column "Old Songs Men Have Sung" in Hoffman's magazine, Adventure. Gordon accepted and used the Adventure column to collect information on traditional American music from the magazine's readers.
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Elias Joseph Bickerman
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Elias Bickerman , also spelled as Bickermann or Bikerman, was a leading scholar of Greco-Roman history and the Hellenistic world. Biography Bickerman was born in Kishinev, then part of the Russian Empire, to a secular Jewish family. He left Russia during the Bolshevik revolution and the Russian civil war for Germany, where he received education from German classicists and Hellenists. Due to the rise of the Nazi Party to power and his Jewish heritage, he fled to France. He soon had to abandon that country as well after the Battle of France. Since 1942 he lived in the U.S. His research interests extended to Judaism and some aspects of Iranian history.
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Arthur I, Duke of Brittany
1187 - 1203 (16 years)
Arthur I was 4th Earl of Richmond and Duke of Brittany between 1196 and 1203. He was the posthumous son of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany, and Constance, Duchess of Brittany. His father, Geoffrey, was the son of Henry II, King of England.
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Montagu Burrows
1819 - 1905 (86 years)
Montagu Burrows was a British historian. Following a career as an officer in the Royal Navy, he was the first Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, holding the Chair from 1862 until his death. He was probably the first academic to lecture on naval history at Oxford or at any university in Britain.
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Hayam Wuruk
1334 - 1389 (55 years)
Hayam Vuruk , also called Rajasanagara, Pa-ta-na-pa-na-wu, or Bhatara Prabhu after 1350, was a Javanese Hindu emperor from the Rajasa dynasty and the 4th emperor of the Majapahit Empire. Together with his prime minister Gajah Mada, he reigned the empire at the time of its greatest power. During his reign, the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, became ingrained in the culture and worldview of the Javanese through the wayang kulit . He was preceded by Tribhuwana Wijayatunggadewi, and succeeded by his son-in-law Wikramawardhana.
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Giorgio Levi Della Vida
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Giorgio Levi Della Vida was an Italian Jewish linguist whose expertise lay in Hebrew, Arabic, and other Semitic languages, as well as on the history and culture of the Near East. Biography Born in Venice to a Jewish family originally from Ferrara, he moved with them first to Genoa and then to Rome, from whose university he graduated in 1909 with the Hebraist Ignazio Guidi. Immediately after graduation, he participated in numerous research expeditions to Cairo, Athens , and Crete.
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Romesh Chunder Dutt
1848 - 1909 (61 years)
Romesh Chunder Dutt was an Indian civil servant, economic historian, translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata. He was one of the prominent proponents of Indian economic nationalism. Early life and education Dutt was born into a distinguished Bengali Maulika Kayastha family. His parents were Thakamani and Isan Chunder Dutt, a Deputy Collector in Bengal, whom Romesh often accompanied on official duties. He was educated in various Bengali District schools, then at Hare School, Calcutta. After his father's untimely death in a boat accident in eastern Bengal, his uncle, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, an accomplished writer, became his guardian in 1861.
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Evarts Boutell Greene
1870 - 1947 (77 years)
Evarts Boutell Greene was an American historian, born in Kobe, Japan, where his parents were missionaries. He graduated Harvard University , and began teaching American history at the University of Illinois, where he was also dean of the college of arts and literature. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1918.
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Albert Pollard
1869 - 1948 (79 years)
Albert Frederick Pollard was a British historian who specialized in the Tudor period. He was one of the founders of the Historical Association in 1906. Life and career Pollard was born in Ryde on the Isle of Wight and educated at Portsmouth Grammar School, Felsted School and Jesus College, Oxford where he achieved a first class honours in Modern History in 1891. He became Assistant Editor of and a contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography in 1893. His main academic post was that of Professor of Constitutional History at University College London which he held from 1903 to 1931. He ...
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Aizu Yaichi
1881 - 1956 (75 years)
Aizu Yaichi was a Japanese poet, calligrapher and historian. Biography Yaichi was born in the Furumachi area of Niigata, Niigata, and was a professor emeritus of ancient Chinese and Japanese art at Waseda University. His focus was mostly on Buddhist art of the Asuka and Nara eras.
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Viktor Novak
1889 - 1977 (88 years)
Viktor Novak was a Yugoslav Croat historian, professor at the University of Belgrade and full member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts , and a corresponding member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts .
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Dimitrie Onciul
1856 - 1923 (67 years)
Dimitrie Onciul was a Romanian historian. He was a member of the Romanian Academy and its president from 1920 until his death in 1923. Biography Onciul was born in Straja, at the time in the Duchy of Bukovina, Austrian Empire, now in Suceava County, Romania. He studied at the University of Czernowitz, where he was active in Arboroasa and then in Societatea Academică Junimea, and at the University of Vienna. In 1884, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Czernowitz.
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Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti
1754 - 1822 (68 years)
Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti , full name: Abd al-Rahman bin Hasan bin Burhan al-Din al-Jabarti , often simply known as Al-Jabarti, was a Somali-Egyptian scholar and historian who spent most of his life in Cairo.
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Marcus Lee Hansen
1892 - 1938 (46 years)
Marcus Lee Hansen was an American historian, who won the 1941 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860 . Biography Hansen was born in Neenah, Wisconsin. He was one of eight children born to Danish immigrant Marcus Hansen and Norwegian immigrant Gina O Lee Hansen . He received a BA from Central College, an MA from the University of Iowa, and a PhD from Harvard University, where he studied under Frederick Jackson Turner. He was Associate Professor of History and Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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