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,
#8251
Stanley Bindoff
1908 - 1980 (72 years)
Stanley Thomas Bindoff was an English historian who specialised in the Tudor and Elizabethan periods. He was the first professor of history at Queen Mary College, University of London. He was the editor of The History of Parliament for the parliaments of 1509–1558, published in 1982.
Go to Profile#8252
Gustave Lanson
1857 - 1934 (77 years)
Gustave Lanson was a French historian and literary critic. He taught at the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. A dominant figure in French literary criticism, he influenced several generations of writers and critics through his teachings, which were anti-systematic and promoted a scrupulous and erudite approach to texts via extensive firsthand research, inventorying, and in-depth historical investigation.
Go to Profile#8253
Oliver Morton Dickerson
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Oliver Morton Dickerson was an American historian, author, and educator. Like his fellow historians Charles McLean Andrews and Lawrence Henry Gipson, Dickerson was a proponent of the "Imperial school" of historians who believed that the American colonies could not be studied or understood except as part of the British Empire. Among his publications were works on the British Board of Trade, the Navigation Acts, and Boston under military rule.
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Karol Maleczyński
1897 - 1968 (71 years)
Karol Maleczyński was a Polish historian. Karol Maleczyński was born October 28, 1897, in Grębowo near Tarnobrzeg. He was son of Stefan and Józefina. Maleczyński attended to gimnazjum in Stanisławów and Lwów from 1907 to 1915. He enrolled at the University in Lwów, but was enlisted to the Austrian Army. Later he served in the Polish Army. After demobilisation he again enrolled at the University in Lwów, where he study history. He graduated in March 1924.
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Robert H. McDowell
1894 - 1980 (86 years)
Robert Harbold McDowell was an American historian and intelligence officer who worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. McDowell, an expert on the Near East, was a professor of Balkan history at the University of Michigan. During World War II he was an OSS desk officer in Cairo and between August and November 1944 a member of an American mission Ranger, to the Chetniks, where he participated in negotiations with Germans to surrender their troops to Chetniks and Americans, and in Operation Halyard, to organize transport of the Allied pilots rescued by Chetniks. In some...
Go to Profile#8256
Rembert W. Patrick
1909 - 1967 (58 years)
Rembert Wallace Patrick was a historian, longtime University of Florida history professor, and prolific author of works on Florida's history, particularly the Reconstruction Era. The Florida Historical Society gives out an award named in his honor.
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Jason Sokol
1900 - Present (126 years)
Jason Sokol is an American historian and an associate professor at the University of New Hampshire. Sokol is the author of three books on the history of the civil rights movement. External links Jason Sokol's websiteFaculty Profile: Jason Sokol
Go to Profile#8258
May McKisack
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
May McKisack was a British medieval historian. She was professor of history at Westfield College in London and later professor of historiography at the University of Oxford and an honorary fellow of Somerville College Oxford. She is today chiefly remembered for writing The Fourteenth Century in George Clark's Oxford History of England.
Go to Profile#8259
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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James Auchmuty
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
James Johnston Auchmuty, , was an Irish born historian and inaugural vice-chancellor of the University of Newcastle, Australia. Early life Auchmuty was born in Portadown, County Armagh, Ireland, the elder son of James Wilson Auchmuty, a Church of Ireland clergyman, and his wife Annie Todd . James Johnston Auchmuty graduated from Trinity College Dublin , having been elected a scholar of the university in 1929. He was elected auditor of the College Historical Society for 1931–32. Auchmuty was schoolmaster at Sandford Park School from 1934 to 1936 and lectured in education at Trinity College 1...
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William Brede Kristensen
1867 - 1953 (86 years)
William Brede Kristensen was a Norwegian born, Dutch theologian, professor and historian of religion. Biography William Brede Kristensen was born at Kristiansand in Vest-Agder, Norway. He was the son of parish priest Kristian Nicolai Kristensen and Caroline Emilie Bjørnson . His mother was a sister of Nobel Prize winning author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson .
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Séraphin Marion
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Seraphin Marion was a Canadian professor, historian and literary critic. Biography Marion was born in Ottawa on November 25, 1896. He was a vocal advocate of francophone rights outside Quebec. Marion graduated from the University of Ottawa with a BA in 1918 and MA in 1922. After receiving his doctorate from the Université de Paris, he taught French at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario . From 1926 to 1954 he taught French and French-Canadian literature at the University of Ottawa, later being named professor emeritus. He authored 20 studies, including a nine-volume collection entitled Les Lettres canadiennes d’autrefois .
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Johannes Gerard van Dillen
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Johannes Gerard van Dillen was a Dutch economic historian. Van Dillen completed gymnasium in Amsterdam and earned his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam in 1914. From 1915 to 1921, he served as privatdozent in economic history at the university. In 1920, he assumed a role at the Bureau for the Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën , an institution dedicated to publishing historical sources. Additionally, he held the position of secretary in the editorial committee of the Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, Land- en Volkenkunde.
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Philip van Ness Myers
1846 - 1937 (91 years)
Philip van Ness Myers was an American historian who was Professor of Economics and History at the University of Cincinnati and an author of several notable works on history. Biography Philip van Ness Myers was born in Tribes Hill, New York on August 10, 1846. He attended Gilmore Academy at Ballston Spa, New York, and graduated from Williams College in 1871. From 1873 and 1874 Myers studied law at Yale University and took graduate a graduate course in economics.
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Jaakko Suolahti
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Jaakko Suolahti was a Finnish classical scholar and historian Suolahti was one of the leading classicists during his time and reached international recognition within the areas of political- and social culture in the Roman Republic.
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Hugh Last
1894 - 1957 (63 years)
Hugh Macilwain Last was Camden Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford and Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. Early life Last was born in London on 3 December 1894; his father was William Last, director of the Science Museum. He was educated at St Paul's School, London and then Lincoln College, Oxford. Starting late at university because of health problems, he obtained a first-class degree in literae humaniores in 1918.
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Maxime Leroy
1873 - 1957 (84 years)
Maxime Leroy was a French jurist and social historian. Career Maxime Leroy studied law at the university of Nancy, where he obtained his doctorate in 1898. A friend of Victor Griffuelhes and Alphonse Merrheim, he devoted his first works to the development of trade unionism and its legal and social impact. In 1909 he founded the "Société des amis du lac" at Soorts-Hossegor, where writers such as J.-H. Rosny jeune, Paul Margueritte and Gaston Chérau had been meeting for some years. A member of the Human Rights League of France and a supporter of the League of Nations, he participated in numerous international meetings and had a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and H.G.
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Edmund Garratt Gardner
1869 - 1935 (66 years)
Edmund Garratt Gardner, FBA was an English scholar and writer, specializing in Italian history and literature. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he was regarded as one of the foremost British Dante scholars.
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Frederick Wood
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Frederick Lloyd Whitfeld Wood was a notable New Zealand historian and university professor. Biography He was born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia in 1903. His father was George Arnold Wood who taught history at the University of Sydney. Wood Jr. was educated at Sydney Grammar School, Sydney University, and Balliol College, Oxford. When he returned to Sydney, he privately tutored the later Nobel-laureate Patrick White.
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Themistocles Zammit
1864 - 1935 (71 years)
Sir Themistocles "Temi" Zammit was a Maltese archaeologist and historian, professor of chemistry, medical doctor, researcher and writer. He served as Rector of the Royal University of Malta and first Director of the National Museum of Archaeology in his native city, Valletta.
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Niccolò Rodolico
1873 - 1969 (96 years)
Niccolò Rodolico was an Italian historian, a professor in the University of Messina and the University of Florence. Born at Trapani, a fishing port in Sicily, after attending the Liceo Ximenes in his home town, where he was a friend of Giovanni Gentile, Rodolico went on to the University of Bologna. There, he was a student of Giosuè Carducci, who directed him towards focussing on the study of history. At first his interests centred on the Late Middle Ages, with particular regard to the social history of Florence. Later, he turned his attention towards modern history and above all that of Tuscany and Southern Italy in the eighteenth century.
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Jonathan Holloway
1900 - Present (126 years)
Jonathan Scott Holloway is an American historian, academic administrator, and the 21st president of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Holloway was named as the president of Rutgers University in January 2020 becoming the first person of color and first African American to be named president of Rutgers. He assumed the position on July 1, 2020. Before coming to Rutgers, he was the provost of Northwestern University, a position he held between August 1, 2017, and July 1, 2020. Before that, he was the dean of Yale College and Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies at Yale University.
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Agnes Mure Mackenzie
1891 - 1956 (65 years)
Agnes Mure Mackenzie CBE was a Scottish historian and writer. Her middle name is frequently misspelled Muir. Life Mackenzie was the daughter of physician and surgeon Dr Murdoch Mackenzie and Sarah Agnes Mackenzie ; Agnes was born in Stornoway on Lewis, then a busy fishing port. In childhood she was taken seriously ill with scarlet fever, the after-effects of which left her with poor hearing and eyesight. Educated at home until the age of fourteen, she then attended the Nicolson Institute until the age of seventeen. She then left Lewis for Aberdeen. As an undergraduate at the University of Abe...
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William Page
1861 - 1934 (73 years)
William Henry Page was a British prolific and pioneering historian and editor. For the last three decades of his life he was general editor of the Victoria County History. Life William Page was born at his family's house at Norfolk Square, Paddington, London on 4 September 1861, the fifth of six children of merchant Henry Page and Georgina . He was privately schooled locally at Dr Westmacott's School and then entered Westminster School, where his education was cut short by the death of his father in 1875. The family moved to "a genteel part" of Lewisham, and Page was articled to a civil engineer.
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Claude H. Van Tyne
1869 - 1930 (61 years)
Claude Halstead Van Tyne was an American historian. He was a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in 1902. He taught history at the University of Michigan from 1903 to 1930 and wrote several books on the American Revolution. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The War of Independence in 1930.
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Barbara Wertheimer
1926 - 1983 (57 years)
Barbara Mayer Wertheimer was an American historian and labor organizer. Her research specialized in United States labor and gender history. Wertheimer served as an associate professor at Cornell University from 1977 to 1983, where she cofounded and directed the Institute for Women and Work at the Industrial and Labor Relations School. Wertheimer was also the first president and founding member of the New York Labor History Association, and is known for her monograph We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America .
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Otto Brunner
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Otto Brunner was an Austrian historian. He is best known for his work on later medieval and early modern European social history. Brunner's research made a sharp break with the traditional forms of political and social history practiced in German and Austrian academia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, proposing in its place a new model of social history informed by attention to "folkish" cultural values, particularly as related to political violence and ideas of lordship and leadership.
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Marijan Mole
1924 - 1963 (39 years)
Marijan Molé was a Slovenian-Polish scholar of Middle and Modern Iranian studies, who also contributed to the fields of Islamic and particularly Sufi studies. Biography His father, Vojeslav Molé , was a Slovenian writer and historian of art who lectured at the University of Ljubljana. In 1925 he moved as a visiting professor to Poland, the native land of Marijan's mother. Molé showed an early interest in linguistics and mathematics. When World War II broke out, his family escaped to Leopoli in Ukraine. Back in Poland, he obtained his doctorate in Iranian philology under the direction of Tadeusz Jan Kowalski at the Jagiellonian University.
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Hem Chandra Raychaudhuri
1892 - 1957 (65 years)
Hem Chandra Raychaudhuri was an Indian historian, known for his studies on ancient India. Early life and education He came from a Baidya family. He was the son of Manoranjan Raychaudhuri, the Zamindar of Ponabalia in the present-day Jhalokati District in Bangladesh, and his wife Tarangini Devi. He completed his schooling at Brajamohan Institution in Barisal. He passed the University of Calcutta's entrance examination in 1907, standing first. He then joined Scottish Church College, Calcutta and after that Presidency College, Calcutta, standing First in the First Class in his B.A. examination in 1911.
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Julius Ruska
1867 - 1949 (82 years)
Julius Ferdinand Ruska was a German orientalist, historian of science and educator. He was a critical scholar of alchemical literature, and of Islamic science, raising many issues on attributions and sources of the texts, and providing translations. The range of his studies was wide, including the Emerald Tablet, a basic hermetic text. From 1924 he headed an institute in Heidelberg, where he has been a student.
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Clarence C. Clendenen
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Clarence Clemens Clendenen was an American historian. He won the 1960 Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association for The United States and Pancho Villa. Biography Clarence C. Clendenen was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado on June 8, 1899.
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James Allen Vann
1939 - 1986 (47 years)
James Allen Vann III was an American historian, specializing in German history of the early modern period. He was a professor of History at Emory University. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he graduated from Washington and Lee University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1961. He served two years in the army, then entered Harvard University, where he received the Doctorate of Philosophy in 1970. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan that same year. He served on the faculty of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1983–84. Following his assignment ...
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Louis R. Gottschalk
1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Louis Reichenthal Gottschalk was an American historian, an expert on Lafayette and the French Revolution. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago, where he was the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of History.
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Thomas Heebøll-Holm
1900 - Present (126 years)
Thomas Heebøll-Holm is a medieval historian at the SAXO Institute at the University of Copenhagen. He is most known for his research involving medieval knights and the possibility that they suffered from Post-traumatic stress disorder and other hardships. In his research, Heeboll-Holm has aimed to apply modern military psychology on the history of knights, using information gained in recent decades on the psychological effects of war on soldiers. Heeboll-Holm has studied a number of ancient texts but has focused on three books by Geoffroi de Charny.
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Otto Vossler
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Otto Vossler was a German historian. Life Born in Heidelberg, Vossler was the younger son of the Romanist Karl Vossler and his wife Ester Countess Gnoli, daughter of the Italian poet and literary historian Count Domenico Gnoli. Growing up in the bilingual parental home, Vossler could translate and publish after the death of his father his correspondence with the Italian anti-fascist Benedetto Croce. After the move of the family, Vossler attended the in Munich. He completed his studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1925 under Hermann Oncken with a doctorate on Mazzini's political thinking in the intellectual currents of his time.
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Pierre Mandonnet
1858 - 1936 (78 years)
Pierre Mandonnet was a French-born, Belgian Dominican historian, important in the neo-Thomist trend of historiography and the recovery of medieval philosophy. He made his reputation with a study of Siger of Brabant.
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Jean Bruchési
1901 - 1979 (78 years)
Jean Bruchési, FRSC was a Canadian writer, historian, public servant, and diplomat. He was the president of the Royal Society of Canada for 1953–4. He was the son of Charles Bruchési, KC and the nephew of Paul Bruchési, Archbishop of Montreal.
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Erwin Walter Palm
1910 - 1988 (78 years)
Erwin Walter Palm was a German Latin American scholar, historian, and writer. Early years Palm was born 28 August 1910 in Frankfurt am Main, in a house that was located near today's Suhrkamp house. He is the only survivor of the Holocaust from his family, his relatives having been murdered by the Nazi regime. Palm studied archaeology at the University of Heidelberg, where he met a fellow student who would become his wife, Hilde Löwenstein .
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Abram L. Sachar
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Abram Leon Sachar was an American historian and founding president of Brandeis University. Early life and education He was born in New York City to Samuel Sachar, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, and Sarah Abramowitz, a native of Jerusalem. When he was 7 years old, his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where his grandfather served as a chief rabbi. He was briefly enlisted for service in World War I, and then attended Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees in history. During his junior year, he studied languages at Harvard and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1920.
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Howard R. Driggs
1873 - 1963 (90 years)
Howard Roscoe Driggs was an English professor at the University of Utah and New York University. He also was the author or editor of more than 50 books, including at least seven novels. Driggs was born in Pleasant Grove, Utah. His parents had come to Utah with the Mormon pioneers. Driggs studied at Brigham Young Academy, the University of Utah, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees, the University of Chicago, and New York University where he received his Ph.D. in 1926.
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Jackson Mutero Chirenje
1935 - 1988 (53 years)
Jackson Mutero Chirenje was a Zimbabwean historian. He was born in Mudzimuirema, Chihota, Rhodesia. He served as Secretary of the African Teachers' Union of Rhodesia in 1961. He received a B.A. in history from Boston University, an M.A. in history from the University of California at Los Angeles and a PhD. in history from University of London. He taught African history, African philosophy and Afro-American history at Harvard University. He was a senior lecturer and chairman of the history department at the University of Zimbabwe.
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Laurence Lafore
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Laurence David Lafore was an American historian. Background Lafore was born into a wealthy family off the Main Line of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Lafore family was a Huguenot family that fled France following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The family fled first to England and then to North America, landing in 1701.
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Michael Sadler
1861 - 1943 (82 years)
Sir Michael Ernest Sadler was an English historian, educationalist and university administrator. He worked at Victoria University of Manchester and was the vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds. He was also a champion of the English public school system.
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Paolo Spriano
1925 - 1988 (63 years)
Paolo Spriano was an Italian historian of the Italian labor and communist movement. Career Spriano studied at the University of Turin. He joined partisans of the Italian Resistance and was a member of the Giustizia e Libertà. After the war he became a journalist for l'Unita and in 1946 joined the Italian Communist Party and was subsequently elected a member of its central committee. He was one of members of the PCI who opposed the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian 1956 uprising. All his historiographical production is centered on moments and figures of the Italian and international labor movement.
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Friedrich Münzer
1868 - 1942 (74 years)
Friedrich Münzer was a German classical scholar noted for the development of prosopography, particularly for his demonstrations of how family relationships in ancient Rome connected to political struggles. He died in Theresienstadt concentration camp.
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George Barton Cutten
1874 - 1962 (88 years)
George Barton Cutten was a Canadian-born psychologist, moral philosopher, historian and university administrator. He was president of Acadia University from 1910 to 1922 and Colgate University from 1922 to 1942.
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Paul Leser
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Paul Leser was a German-American ethnologist. Life Paul Leser came from a well-to-do Jewish family in Frankfurt. His father was a provincial high court judge. Leser attended the Goethe-Gymnasium, Frankfurt from 1908 to 1917 and studied ethnology at the University of Bonn in 1919. He was a student of Fritz Graebner and was conferred a doctorate by him in March 1925. From 1928 until 1930 he was employed as a scientific laborer at the Museum for Ethnology in Frankfurt am Main. In 1929 he lectured at the Technical University at Darmstadt and became an associate professor for ethnology. From 1929 until 1933 he taught as an associate professor for ethnology on the Technical College of Darmstadt .
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Agnieszka Biedrzycka
1900 - Present (126 years)
Agnieszka Biedrzycka is a Polish historian and writer from the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences . She obtained her doctorate in December 2002 from the Faculty of History of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Biedrzycka serves as research scientist and editor for the multi-volume Polish Biographical Dictionary published by PAN incrementally. She is in charge of the History of Poland in the Early Modern era department. Since the 1989 return to democracy from under the Soviet-led totalitarian control, many distortions printed there have already been corrected. H...
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Robert Digges Wimberly Connor
1878 - 1950 (72 years)
Robert Digges Wimberly Connor was an American historian who served as the first state archivist of North Carolina from 1907 to 1921, and later as the first Archivist of the United States from 1934 to 1941.
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