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,
#8601
Kazimierz Piwarski
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Kazimierz Piwarski was a Polish historian, professor of Jagiellonian University in Kraków since 1946 and Poznań University in years 1953-1955, member of Polish Academy of Skills since 1945, and member of Polish Academy of Sciences since 1958.
Go to Profile#8602
Theodore Saloutos
1910 - 1980 (70 years)
Theodore Saloutos was an American historian. His areas of research included agrarian politics and reform movements, immigration studies, and Greek immigration to the United States Early life Saloutos was born in Milwaukie, Wisconsin on August 3, 1910. His parents were immigrants from Greece.
Go to Profile#8603
Gerardus Vossius
1577 - 1649 (72 years)
Gerrit Janszoon Vos , often known by his Latin name Gerardus Vossius, was a Dutch classical scholar and theologian. Life He was the son of Johannes Vos, a Protestant from the Netherlands, who fled from persecution into the Electorate of the Palatinate and briefly became pastor in the village near Heidelberg where Gerardus was born, before friction with the strict Lutherans of the Palatinate caused him to settle the following year at the University of Leiden as student of theology, and finally became pastor at Dordrecht, where he died in 1585. Here in Dordrecht the son received his education,...
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Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol
1847 - 1920 (73 years)
Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol was a Romanian historian, philosopher, professor, economist, sociologist, and author. Among his many major accomplishments, he is the Romanian historian credited with authoring the first major synthesis of the history of the Romanian people. His daughter Margareta Xenopol became a well-known Romanian composer.
Go to Profile#8605
Christian Molbech
1783 - 1857 (74 years)
Christian Molbech was a Danish historian, literary critic, writer, and theater director. He was a professor of literature at the University of Copenhagen and was the founding editor of Historisk Tidsskrift
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David Feuerwerker
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
David Feuerwerker was a French Jewish rabbi and professor of Jewish history who was effective in the resistance to German occupation the Second World War. He was completely unsuspected until six months before the war ended, when he fled to Switzerland and his wife and baby went underground in France. The French government cited him for his bravery with several awards. After the war, he and his wife re-established the Jewish community of Lyon. He settled in Paris, teaching at the Sorbonne. In 1966, he and his family, grown to six children, moved to Montreal, where he developed a department of ...
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John Joseph Saunders
1910 - 1972 (62 years)
John Joseph Saunders was a British historian whose work focused on medieval Islamic and Asian history. Born in Alphington, Devon, he was educated at Exeter University. He was a lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Geoffrey Rice wrote of him: John Saunders was an only child, and books were his best companions from an early age. He also displayed artistic ability with pen and ink drawing, having something of a gift for cartoons and caricature. At school at Mount Radford in Exeter he showed particular aptitude for languages, literature and history. One of the masters who noticed his potential, Theodore Vine, became a lifelong friend.
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Militsa Nechkina
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Militsa Vasilyevna Nechkina was a Soviet historian. She taught at Moscow State University and extensively studied the Decembrist revolt of 1825. Biography Nechkina was born in Nizhyn, Russian Empire. She attended Kazan University, graduating in 1921. She began teaching history at Moscow State University in 1924 and became a doctor of historical sciences in 1936. She specialized in the study of the Decembrist revolt and was the first historian to write in detail about the social and ideological aspects of the revolt. As a historian, she also contributed to Soviet history topics in the Great So...
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Geoffrey Bruun
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Geoffrey Bruun was a historian and biographer who taught at New York University from 1927 until 1941. He was born in Montreal, Quebec and received a bachelor's degree from the University of British Columbia, and master's and doctoral degrees from Cornell University. After retiring as a professor of history from N.Y.U., he was a visiting professor at Cornell, Mt. Holyoke College, Smith College, the University of Illinois, and Georgetown University.
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Herbert J. Muller
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
Herbert J. Muller was an American historian, academic, government official and writer. He received his education at Cornell University. He taught at Cornell, Purdue and Indiana University , served in the Department of State, the War Production Board, and frequently lectured abroad.
Go to Profile#8611
Şihabetdin Märcani
1818 - 1889 (71 years)
Şihabetdin Märcani was a Tatar Hanafi Maturidi theologian and historian. He studied in madrassas of Tashkichu , Bukhara and Samarkand. Beginning in 1850 he served as the imam of the First Cathedral Mosque. Later, in 1867, he became a muhtasib of Kazan. At the same time, in 1876-1884 he lectured on religion in the Tatar Teachers' School. Märcani became the first Muslim member of The Society for Archaeology, History and Ethnography at Kazan State University. In his papers he illustrated his ideas about the renovation and the perfection of the Tatar educational system. As a historian, he was the...
Go to Profile#8612
Frederick L. Schuman
1904 - 1981 (77 years)
Frederick Lewis Schuman was an American professor of history, political science and international relations at Williams College. Career Schuman was a professor of history at University of Chicago and then for 32 years at Williams College. He analyzed international relations and social science, focusing on the period between World War I and World War II.
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Rodolphe Guilland
1888 - 1981 (93 years)
Rodolphe Joseph Guilland was a French Byzantinist. Life Born in 1888, he completed his thesis on Nikephoros Gregoras , and succeeded his teacher Charles Diehl in the seat of Byzantine studies at the Sorbonne in 1934, which he held until his retirement in 1958. His chief interest was in the late Byzantine period , particularly the Palaiologan period, and his main areas of research were the history of the Great Palace of Constantinople, and of the offices, dignities, and administrative apparatus of the Byzantine state.
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Arthur Stanley Tritton
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
Arthur Stanley Tritton was a British Arabist. He wrote a number of books on Islam and its history, and from 1938 to 1946 was Professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Life Tritton was born on 25 February 1881. His father was the senior pastor of a Congregational church in Great Yarmouth, but when Tritton was still young the family moved to Wandsworth.
Go to Profile#8615
Avery Craven
1885 - 1980 (95 years)
Avery Odelle Craven was an American historian who wrote extensively about the nineteenth-century United States, the American Civil War and Congressional Reconstruction from a then-revisionist viewpoint sympathetic to the Lost Cause as well as democratic failings during his own lifetime.
Go to Profile#8616
Joseph Strayer
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Joseph Reese Strayer was an American medievalist. He was a student of Charles Homer Haskins. Life Strayer graduated from Princeton University and Harvard University . Strayer taught at Princeton University for many decades, starting in the 1930s. He was chair of the history department and president of the American Historical Association in 1971. Strayer has been credited with training a large percentage of the American medievalist profession with liberal fashion; many of his students are still teaching and active. Notable students include Teofilo Ruiz, William Chester Jordan, and Richard W.
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Michael Rostovtzeff
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff, or Rostovtsev , was a Russian historian whose career straddled the 19th and 20th centuries and who produced important works on ancient Roman and Greek history. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
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Salo Wittmayer Baron
1895 - 1989 (94 years)
Salo Wittmayer Baron was an Austrian-born American historian, described as "the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century". Baron taught at Columbia University from 1930 until his retirement in 1963.
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James T. Shotwell
1874 - 1965 (91 years)
James Thomson Shotwell was a Canadian-born American history professor. He played an instrumental role in the creation of the International Labour Organization in 1919, as well as for his influence in promoting inclusion of a declaration of human rights in the UN Charter.
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Crane Brinton
1898 - 1968 (70 years)
Clarence Crane Brinton was an American historian of France, as well as a historian of ideas. His most famous work, The Anatomy of Revolution likened the dynamics of revolutionary movements to the progress of fever.
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Arthur N. Holcombe
1884 - 1977 (93 years)
Arthur Norman Holcombe was an American political scientist and educator who taught at Harvard University from 1910 until his retirement in 1955. He was known for his studies of government structure.
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Richard Hofstadter
1916 - 1970 (54 years)
Richard Hofstadter was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historical materialist approach to history, in the 1950s he came closer to the concept of "consensus history", and was epitomized by some of his admirers as the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus." Others see in his work an early critique of the one-dimensional society, as Hofstadter was equally critical of socialist and capitalist models of society, and bemoaned the "consensus" w...
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J. R. Partington
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
James Riddick Partington was a British chemist and historian of chemistry who published multiple books and articles in scientific magazines. His most famous works were An Advanced Treatise on Physical Chemistry and A History of Chemistry , for which he received the Dexter Award and the George Sarton Medal.
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Carter G. Woodson
1875 - 1950 (75 years)
Carter Godwin Woodson was an American historian, author, journalist, and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History . He was one of the first scholars to study the history of the African diaspora, including African-American history. A founder of The Journal of Negro History in 1916, Woodson has been called the "father of black history." In February 1926, he launched the celebration of "Negro History Week," the precursor of Black History Month. Woodson was an important figure to the movement of Afrocentrism, due to his perspective of placing people of Afr...
Go to Profile#8625
Jill Harries
Jill Diana Harries is Professor Emerita in Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. She is known for her work on late antiquity, particularly aspects of Roman legal culture and society. Career Jill Harries studied Literae Humaniores at Somerville College, Oxford and completed her PhD in 1981. Harries was appointed Lecturer in Ancient History at St Andrews in 1976, and Professor in 1997. She served as the head of the School of Classics 2000-2003. Harries retired in 2013 and her retirement was marked by a conference in her honour.
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Thomas McKeown
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
Thomas McKeown was a British physician, epidemiologist and historian of medicine. Largely based on demographic data from England and Wales, McKeown argued that the population growth since the late eighteenth century was due to improving economic conditions, i.e. better nutrition, rather than to better hygiene, public health measures and improved medicine . This became known as the "McKeown thesis".
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Charles A. Beard
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Charles Austin Beard was an American historian and professor, who wrote primarily during the first half of the 20th century. A history professor at Columbia University, Beard's influence is primarily due to his publications in the fields of history and political science. His works included a radical re-evaluation of the Founding Fathers of the United States, whom he believed to be more motivated by economics than by philosophical principles. Beard's most influential book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States , has been the subject of great controversy ever since its publication.
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Richard Harrison Shryock
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Richard Harrison Shryock was an American medical historian, specializing in the connection of medical history with general history. Biography Shryock studied at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy and then at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating there with a bachelor's degree in 1917 and a PhD in American history in 1924. Before 1917 he taught school in Philadelphia. During WWI he served as a private in the United States Army Ambulance Service. He was instructor of history from 1921 to 1924 at Ohio State University and from 1924 to 1925 at the University of Pennsylvania. In Duke Univers...
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Solomon Zeitlin
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Solomon Zeitlin was an American Jewish historian, Talmudic scholar and in his time the world's leading authority on the Second Commonwealth, also known as the Second Temple period. His work The Rise and Fall of the Judean State is about the Second Temple period.
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N. S. B. Gras
1884 - 1956 (72 years)
Norman Scott Brien Gras , known as N. S. B. Gras, was a Canadian professor at the Harvard Business School who invented the academic discipline of business history. Early life Gras was born in 1884 in Toronto, Ontario. He graduated from the University of Western Ontario. He went on to receive a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
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Herbert Feis
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Herbert Feis was an American historian, author, and economist who was the Advisor on International Economic Affairs in the US Department of State during the Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt administrations.
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Victor Ehrenberg
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Victor Ehrenberg was a German Jewish historian. Life Ehrenberg was born in Altona, Hamburg to a noted German Jewish family. He was the younger brother of Hans Ehrenberg and the nephew of the jurist Victor Ehrenberg, and a nephew of economist Richard Ehrenberg.
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Rayford Logan
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Rayford Whittingham Logan was an African-American historian and Pan-African activist. He was best known for his study of post-Reconstruction America, a period he termed "the nadir of American race relations". In the late 1940s he was the chief advisor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on international affairs. He was professor emeritus of history at Howard University.
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Irving A. Leonard
1896 - 1996 (100 years)
Irving Albert Leonard was an American historian and translator, specializing in Hispanic history and art. His best known publications are Books of the Brave and Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-Century Persons, Places and Practices , which won the Conference on Latin American History award for the best book in English. Books of the Brave, a valuable account of the introduction of literary culture to Spain's New World, was updated in 1992. He had many papers published in the American Historical Review and the Hispanic American Historical Review, such as A Frontier Library, 1799 .
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Philip Taft
1902 - 1976 (74 years)
Philip Taft was an American labor historian whose research focused on the labor history of the United States and the American Federation of Labor. Early life Taft was born on March 22, 1902, in Syracuse, New York. His father died when he was still a young boy. His mother moved the family to New York City, where she took up work as a house cleaner.
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Albert T. Olmstead
1880 - 1945 (65 years)
Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead was an American historian and academic, who specialized in Assyriology. Olmstead was born in 1880 in New York, and died in 1945 in Chicago. He was Professor of Oriental History at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Among his doctoral students was Neilson C. Debevoise, later an influential historian of the Parthian Empire.
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Richard B. Morris
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Richard Brandon Morris was an American historian best known for his pioneering work in colonial American legal history and the early history of American labor. In later years, he shifted his research interests to the constitutional, diplomatic, and political history of the American Revolution and the making of the United States Constitution.
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George Wynn Brereton Huntingford
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
George Wynn Brereton Huntingford was an English linguist, anthropologist and historian. He lectured in East African languages and cultures at SOAS, University of London from 1950 until 1966. In 1966, Huntingford went to Canada to organise the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Brunswick at Fredericton, and retired to Málaga the next year, where he lived after his retirement.
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Frank Stenton
1880 - 1967 (87 years)
Sir Frank Merry Stenton FBA was an English historian of Anglo-Saxon England, a professor of history at the University of Reading , president of the Royal Historical Society , Reading University's vice-chancellor .
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John Knox Laughton
1830 - 1915 (85 years)
Sir John Knox Laughton was a British naval historian and arguably the first to delineate the importance of the subject of Naval history as an independent field of study. Beginning his working life as a mathematically trained civilian instructor for the Royal Navy, he later became professor of modern history at King's College London and a co-founder of the Navy Records Society. A prolific writer of lives, he penned the biographies of more than 900 naval personalities for the Dictionary of National Biography.
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Vasile Pârvan
1882 - 1927 (45 years)
Vasile Pârvan was a Romanian historian and archaeologist. Biography Pârvan was born in Perchiu, Huruiești commune, Bacău County. He came from a modest family, being the first child of the teacher Andrei Pârvan and of Aristița Chiriac . He received the first name Vasile, as well as his uncle, Vasile Conta .
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Goldwin Smith
1823 - 1910 (87 years)
Goldwin Smith was a British historian and journalist, active in the United Kingdom and Canada. In the 1860s he also taught at Cornell University in the United States. Life and career Early life and education Smith was born at Reading, Berkshire. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford, and after a brilliant undergraduate career he was elected to a fellowship at University College, Oxford. He threw his energy into the cause of university reform with another fellow of University College, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. On the Royal Commission of 1850 to inquire into the reform of ...
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Basil II
958 - 1025 (67 years)
Basil II Porphyrogenitus , nicknamed the Bulgar Slayer , was the senior Byzantine emperor from 976 to 1025. He and his brother Constantine VIII were crowned before their father Romanos II died in 963, but they were too young to rule. The throne thus went to two generals, Nikephoros Phokas and John Tzimiskes before Basil became senior emperor, though his influential great-uncle Basil Lekapenos remained as the de facto ruler until 985. His reign of 49 years and 11 months was the longest of any Roman emperor.
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William Wilson Hunter
1840 - 1900 (60 years)
Sir William Wilson Hunter was a Scottish historian, statistician, a compiler and a member of the Indian Civil Service. He is most known for The Imperial Gazetteer of India on which he started working in 1869, and which was eventually published in nine volumes in 1881, then fourteen, and later as a twenty-six volume set after his death.
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Orderic Vitalis
1075 - 1142 (67 years)
Orderic Vitalis was an English chronicler and Benedictine monk who wrote one of the great contemporary chronicles of 11th- and 12th-century Normandy and Anglo-Norman England. Working out of the Abbey of Saint-Evroul, he is credited with writing the Historia Ecclesiatica, a work detailing the history of Europe and the Mediterranean from the birth of Jesus Christ into his own age. The son of a cleric, he was of born into a noble family, claiming both English and Norman heritage. While he is known primarily for the Historia Ecclesiastica, he also was able to ascend to various positions within the church including that script master, librarian, and cantor.
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Robert Wipper
1859 - 1954 (95 years)
Robert Yuryevich Wipper was a Russian, Latvian and Soviet historian of classical antiquity, and the medieval and modern periods. Biography Born in Moscow, Wipper graduated from the faculty of history and philology at the Moscow University in 1880. In 1894, he had become the Doctor of General History and in 1901–1919 was the Professor in Ordinary of the Department of General History. He later attained the professorship. Wipper lectured the history of prehistoric culture, the history of the Ancient East, Greece, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, as well as social ideas and the methodology of history.
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Ōkubo Toshimichi
1830 - 1878 (48 years)
was a Japanese statesman and one of the Three Great Nobles regarded as the main founders of modern Japan. Ōkubo was a samurai of the Satsuma Domain and joined the movement to overthrow the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate during the Bakumatsu period. Upon the founding of the new Empire of Japan, Ōkubo became a leading member of the Meiji Restoration and a prominent member of the Meiji oligarchy. Following his return from the Iwakura Mission in 1873, he became Lord of Home Affairs and used his office's authority to rapidly expand his influence within the Restoration government. Shortly thereafter, he had firmly established himself as the country's de facto dictator.
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Francis Parkman
1823 - 1893 (70 years)
Francis Parkman Jr. was an American historian, best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monumental seven-volume France and England in North America. These works are still valued as historical sources and as literature. He was also a leading horticulturist, briefly a professor of horticulture at Harvard University and author of several books on the topic. Parkman wrote essays opposed to legal voting for women that continued to circulate long after his death. Parkman was a trustee of the Boston Athenæum from 1858 until his death in 1893.
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Alexander Jannaeus
127 BC - 76 BC (51 years)
Alexander Jannaeus was the second king of the Hasmonean dynasty, who ruled over an expanding kingdom of Judaea from 103 to 76 BCE. A son of John Hyrcanus, he inherited the throne from his brother Aristobulus I, and married his brother's widow, Queen Salome Alexandra. From his conquests to expand the kingdom to a bloody civil war, Alexander's reign has been generalised as cruel and oppressive with never-ending conflict. The major historical sources of Alexander's life are Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish War.
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John William Draper
1811 - 1882 (71 years)
John William Draper was an English-born American scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian and photographer. He is credited with pioneering portrait photography and producing the first detailed photograph of the moon in 1840. He was also the first president of the American Chemical Society and a founder of the New York University School of Medicine.
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