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,
#8251
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
1877 - 1934 (57 years)
#8252
Preserved Smith
1880 - 1941 (61 years)
Preserved Smith was an American historian of the Protestant Reformation. He was the son of Henry Preserved Smith, a scholar of the Old Testament, and inherited his name from a line of Puritan ancestors stretching back to the 17th century. He attended Amherst College and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1907, and continued studies at the Sorbonne and the University of Berlin. Like his mentor James Harvey Robinson at Columbia, he had a high respect for science and a belief that knowledge of history was a way to improve human prospects for the future. He taught at Cornell University as a member of the Department of History from 1923 to 1941.
Go to Profile#8253
Hugh Talmage Lefler
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Hugh Talmage Lefler was a historian known for his work on the history of North Carolina. He was born in Cooleemee, North Carolina, and grew up on a farm in Davie County. He taught at the University of North Carolina for many years and authored a number of books. His book The Growth of North Carolina was used as the standard state history textbook in North Carolina public schools. His book North Carolina, History of a Southern State was the leading text on the subject. Author Sam Ragan, writing in the North Carolina Historical Review, wrote that Lefler "made history come alive in the classroom...
Go to Profile#8254
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...
Go to Profile#8255
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.
Go to Profile#8256
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.
Go to Profile#8257
Earl Lewis
1900 - Present (125 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...
Go to Profile#8258
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.
Go to Profile#8259
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.
Go to Profile#8262
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.
Go to Profile#8263
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.
Go to Profile#8264
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.
Go to Profile#8265
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...
Go to Profile#8266
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.
Go to Profile#8267
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.
Go to Profile#8268
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.
Go to Profile#8269
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...
Go to Profile#8270
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 .
Go to Profile#8271
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...
Go to Profile#8273
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.
Go to Profile#8274
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.
Go to Profile#8276
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.
Go to Profile#8277
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' .
Go to Profile#8278
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.
Go to Profile#8279
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.
Go to Profile#8281
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.
Go to Profile#8282
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...
Go to Profile#8283
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.
Go to Profile#8286
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.
Go to Profile#8288
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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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.
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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.
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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#8294
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 (125 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
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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#8297
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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