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,
#8201
Pedro Armillas
1914 - 1984 (70 years)
Pedro Armillas Garcia was Spanish academic anthropologist, archaeologist, and an influential pre-Columbian Mesoamerica scholar of the mid-20th century. As an archaeologist he was known both for his fieldwork and excavations at numerous sites in central and northern Mexico, and his contributions in archaeological theory. His study of how Mesoamerican agriculture and subsistence modes of production influenced the development of Mesoamerican cultures was a pioneering one, and he was one of the earliest to investigate pre-Columbian irrigation and hydraulic systems.
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Constance Rourke
1885 - 1941 (56 years)
Constance Mayfield Rourke was an American author and educator. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Sorbonne and Vassar College. She taught at Vassar from 1910 to 1915. She died in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1941.
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Robert S. Lopez
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Roberto Sabatino Lopez was an Italian-born American historian of medieval European economic history. He taught for many years at Yale University as a Sterling Professor of History. Early life and education Roberto Sabatino Lopez was born in Genoa, Italy. His family were Sephardi Jews. He received a doctorate from the University of Milan in 1932 and taught medieval history at various universities, serving at one point as Chair of History at the University of Genoa. Lopez fled Benito Mussolini's regime for England in 1939, where he came under the influence of Cecil Roth. Robert L. Reynolds, a friend of Lopez, informed him that an American Ph.D.
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Henry William Carless Davis
1874 - 1928 (54 years)
Henry William Carless Davis was a British historian, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and Oxford Regius Professor of Modern History. Early career Davis was born in Ebley, near Stroud, Gloucestershire the eldest of five children of Henry Frederick Alexander Davis, a solicitor, and his wife, Jessie Anna. The children were brought up by their mother, who moved to Weymouth in 1884 to open a school for young children including her own, and was successful enough to be appointed first headmistress of Weymouth College preparatory school in 1903. Davis attended Weymouth College from ...
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Bernard Pares
1867 - 1949 (82 years)
Sir Bernard Pares KBE was an English historian and diplomat. During the First World War, he was seconded to the Foreign Ministry in Petrograd, Russia, where he reported political events back to London, and worked in propaganda. He returned to London as professor of Russian history. He is best known for his numerous books on Russia, especially his standard textbook, A History of Russia , which had highly detailed coverage of the revolutionary era. He was a very active public speaker in the 1940s in support of Stalin's Soviet Union.
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S. Everett Gleason
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
Sarell Everett Gleason was an American historian and intelligence analyst. Life He grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He graduated from Harvard University, in 1927, magna cum laude, and with a Ph.D. in 1934. He taught at Harvard University, from 1931 to 1938. On June 19, 1937, he married Mary Eleanor Abbott.
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P. K. Baillie Reynolds
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Paul Kenneth Baillie Reynolds, CBE was a British classical scholar and archaeologist who studied specialised Roman troops such as the frumentarii and the vigiles. He was the son of Louis Baillie Reynolds, a stockbroker, and novelist Gertrude Minnie Robins. He studied at Hertford College, Oxford between 1915 and 1919, his studies being interrupted by World War I. He served in the Royal Artillery.
Go to Profile#8208
Natan Eidelman
1930 - 1989 (59 years)
Natan Yakovlevich Eidelman was a Soviet Russian author and historian. He wrote several books on about the life and work of Alexander Pushkin, Decembrists Sergey Muravyov-Apostol and Mikhail Lunin, and historian Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin. He is the father of Tamara Eidelman.
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Witold Jakóbczyk
1909 - 1986 (77 years)
Witold Jakóbczyk was a Polish historian and professor at Poznań University, specializing in the history of Greater Poland in the 19th century. Publications Witold Jakóbczyk , Studia nad dziejami Wielkopolski w XIX w., vol.I–III, Poznań 1951–1967.Witold Jakóbczyk , Wielkopolanie XIX w., Poznań 1969.Witold Jakóbczyk , Wielkopolska. Wybór źródeł, t. I 1815–1850, Wrocław 1952.Witold Jakóbczyk , Wielkopolska. Wybór źródeł, t. II 1851–1914, Wrocław 1954.
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Elsa Goveia
1925 - 1980 (55 years)
Elsa Goveia was born in British Guiana and became a foremost scholar and historian of the Caribbean. She was the first woman to become a professor at the newly created University College of the West Indies and first professor of West Indian studies in the UCWI History Department. Her seminal work, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century , was a pioneering study of the institution of slavery and the first to put forth the concept of a "slave society" encompassing not just the slaves but the entire community. She was one of the pioneers of historical r...
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Gray C. Boyce
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Gray Cowan Boyce was an American medieval historian and historical bibliographer whose masterwork was his five volume Literature of Medieval History, 1930–1975: A Supplement to Louis John Paetow's "A Guide to the Study of Medieval History" .
Go to Profile#8212
Guillermo Feliú Cruz
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Guillermo Feliú Cruz was a Chilean historian, bibliographer and librarian. He learned historical method by José Toribio Medina who later successfully proposed Feliú Cruz as curator of Biblioteca Americana in the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.
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Peter Guilday
1884 - 1947 (63 years)
Monsignor Peter Keenan Guilday US Catholic priest and historian. Life Guilday was born in Chester, Pennsylvania of Irish parents. Graduated from Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia in 1901. He studied for the priesthood at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, Overbrook PA. In 1907 he gained a scholarship to the American College of Louvain. He was ordained to the priesthood there on July 11, 1909, by Henry Gabriels.
Go to Profile#8214
Leopold George Wickham Legg
1877 - 1962 (85 years)
Leopold George Wickham Legg was an English academic historian specializing in diplomatic history. An Oxford don from 1908 to 1948, for the Great War Legg was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Apart from his own research work, he was editor of the Dictionary of National Biography.
Go to Profile#8215
Chauncey Samuel Boucher
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
Chauncey Samuel Boucher was an American academic and historian. Boucher was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Chauncey Watson Boucher and Elizabeth Celstea Van Loon. He was a professor of history at the University of Chicago; president of West Virginia University; and chancellor of the University of Nebraska. He died at Petoskey, Emmet, Michigan in 1955, aged 69.
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E. Wilson Lyon
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Elijah Wilson Lyon was an American diplomatic historian who was the sixth president of Pomona College from 1941 to 1969. Born in Mississippi, he studied at the University of Mississippi and Colgate University, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. During his tenure at Pomona, he guided the college through a transformational and turbulent period, and he is credited with helping shape it into a leading liberal arts institution. After his retirement, he wrote a history of the college, published in 1977.
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John Leddy Phelan
1924 - 1976 (52 years)
John Leddy Phelan was a scholar of colonial Spanish America and the Philippines. He spent the bulk of his scholarly career as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Biography John Leddy Phelan was born in Fall River, Massachusetts to an Irish American family. Phelan graduated from Harvard College cum laude in History in 1947; he earned his doctorate at University of California, Berkeley in 1951. His dissertation on the Franciscan Order in early colonial Mexico became the basis for his first book, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World: A Study of the Writings of Gerónimo de Mendieta , which remains an important work in the field of early Latin America.
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F. S. L. Lyons
1923 - 1983 (60 years)
Francis Stewart Leland Lyons was an Irish historian and academic who was Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 1974 to 1981. Biography Known as Le among his friends and family, Lyons was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1923, where his father was a bank official. He was born into an Irish Protestant family of Presbyterian and Church of Ireland background. After his birth, his family soon moved to Boyle, County Roscommon. He was educated at Dover College in Kent and later attended The High School, Dublin. At Trinity College Dublin, he was elected a Scholar in Modern History and Political...
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William Starr Myers
1877 - 1956 (79 years)
William Starr Myers was a Princeton University professor and historian who chronicled New Jersey and the GOP Myers was the son of J. Norris Myers and Laura Virginia Starr of Baltimore, the family later moving to North Carolina. Myers married Margaret Barr on 8 June 1910.
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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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Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar
1884 - 1937 (53 years)
Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar was a Marathi sociologist, historian and novelist from Maharashtra, India. He is principally known as the chief editor of Maharashtriya Jnanakosha, the first-ever encyclopedia in the Marathi language.
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Asad Rustum
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Asad bin Jibrāʼīl Rustum Mujāʻiṣ was a Lebanese historian, academic and writer. He published more than 15 books related to the history of the Middle East. Life Rustum was born in Dhour El Choueir on 4 June 1897. He obtained his bachelor and master from the American University of Beirut in 1919, then PhD in History of the Middle East from the University of Chicago in 1923, then he went back to Beirut where he taught History of the Middle East at the American University of Beirut until his resignation in 1943. He received the Order of Civil Merit of the Syrian Arab Republic and the Lebanese ord...
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