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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,

#8601

Laurence B. Packard

1887 - 1909 (22 years)

Laurence Bradford Packard was an American historian. Early life He was born in Brockton, Massachusetts in 1887. He studied at Brockton High School. In 1909, he completed his A.B. degree from Harvard University.

#8602

John Leonard Clive

1924 - 1990 (66 years)

John Leonard Clive was an American historian. He was a professor at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He is most well known for his biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, for which he won the National Book Award for Biography and History.

#8603

Francisco Cantera Burgos

1901 - 1978 (77 years)

Don Francisco Cantera Burgos was a Spanish historian. He received worldwide recognition for his studies on Jewish culture in Spain. He studied law at the University of Valladolid and philosophy at Universidad Central de Madrid. He co-founded the Arias Montano Institute and the magazine Sepharad, where he published countless articles. Following the creation of the institute, he served as the first director of the Sephardic Museum in Toledo, Spain.

#8604

Andreas Hillgruber

1925 - 1989 (64 years)

Andreas Fritz Hillgruber was a conservative German historian who was influential as a military and diplomatic historian who played a leading role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. In his controversial book Zweierlei Untergang, he wrote that historians should "identify" with the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front and asserted that there was no moral difference between Allied policies towards Germany in 1944 and 1945 and the genocide waged against the Jews. The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Hillgruber was a great historian whose once-sterling reputation was in ruins as ...

#8605

Romilly Jenkins

1907 - 1969 (62 years)

Romilly James Heald Jenkins was a British scholar in Byzantine and Modern Greek studies. He occupied the prestigious seat of Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London, in 1946–1960.

#8606

Lewis Eldon Atherton

1905 - 1989 (84 years)

Lewis Eldon Atherton was an American historian and academic from Missouri. He taught at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, for over 30 years. Early life Atherton was born on March 1, 1905, in the small town of Bosworth, Missouri. He was the son of Caleb Franklin Atherton and Ethel Framer. Although born in Missouri, his family originated from Brown County, Ohio. His early years were spent on the family farm.

#8607

Hugh Pemberton

Hugh R. Pemberton, FRHistS, is an academic historian specialising in the late twentieth-century British politics and British social and economic policy. As of 2018, he is Professor of Contemporary British History at the University of Bristol.

#8608

Thomas J. Wertenbaker

1879 - 1966 (87 years)

Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker was a leading American historian and the second Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University. Early and family life Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, he was the youngest son of former CSA Colonel Charles C. Wertenbaker and his wife Fanny .

#8609

Marshall Hodgson

1922 - 1968 (46 years)

Marshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson , was an Islamic studies academic and a world historian at the University of Chicago. He was chairman of the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought in Chicago. Life Marshall Hodgson was born in Richmond, Indiana in April 11, 1922. He was a practicing Quaker and a strict vegetarian. He worked in the Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector from 1943 to 1946. In 1951, he received his PhD from the University of Chicago, where he later became professor, receiving tenure in 1961, becoming chairman of the Committee in Social Thought in 1964 and the newly established Committee on Near Eastern Studies in the same year.

#8610

Gilbert Chinard

1881 - 1972 (91 years)

Gilbert Chinard was a French-American historian, professor emeritus, who authored over 40 books. Born on October 17, 1881, in Chatellerault, France, to Hilaire and Marie Chinard, educated at the Universities of Poitiers and Bordeaux, in 1908, he married Emma Blanchard, then moved to New York as a visiting instructor in French Literature, leading him in an American academic career, teaching positions at Brown University , the University of California, Berkeley , Johns Hopkins University , and Princeton University .

#8611

Theodore Plucknett

Theodore Plucknett

1897 - 1965 (68 years)

Theodore Frank Thomas Plucknett was a British legal historian who was the first chair of legal history at the London School of Economics. Plucknett was born on 2 January 1897 in Bristol. Plucknett completed his early education at Alderman Newton's School in Leicester and then Bacup and Rawstenstall school in Newchurch, Lancashire. He completed his degree in history at London University and graduated with second class honours. He later completed his master's degree at University College London before his twenty-first birthday. He was also awarded the Alexander prize of the Royal Historical Society.

#8612

Merritt Yerkes Hughes

1893 - 1971 (78 years)

Merritt Yerkes Hughes Hughes was an expert in the literature of France, England and Italy. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1925, the first year they were given. Life Hughes was born May 24, 1893, in Philadelphia; he received a bachelor's degree from Boston University in 1915, a master's degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1918, a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1921 and a D.Litt. from the University of Edinburgh in 1950.

#8613

Noël Denholm-Young

1904 - 1975 (71 years)

Noël Denholm-Young was an English historian. He was a Fellow and archivist of Magdalen College, Oxford specialising in the political history of late medieval England. He worked as keeper of Western manuscripts at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and later in the faculty of the University College of North Wales, Bangor. Among his publications was an edition of the chronicle Vita Edwardi Secundi.

#8614

Jérôme Carcopino

Jérôme Carcopino

1881 - 1970 (89 years)

Jérôme Carcopino was a French historian and author. He was the fifteenth member elected to occupy seat 3 of the Académie française, in 1955. Biography Carcopino was born at Verneuil-sur-Avre, Eure, son of a doctor from a Corsican family related to Bonaparte, and educated at the École Normale Supérieure where he specialised in history. From 1904 to 1907 he was a member of the French School in Rome. In 1912 he was a professor of history in Le Havre. In 1912 he became a lecturer at the University of Algiers and inspector of antiquities in Algeria until 1920. His career was interrupted by World War I when he served in the Dardanelles.

#8615

George Sansom

1883 - 1965 (82 years)

Sir George Bailey Sansom was a British diplomat and historian of pre-modern Japan, particularly noted for his historical surveys and his attention to Japanese society and culture. Early life Sansom was born in London, where his father was a naval architect, but was educated in France and Germany, including the University of Giessen and the University of Marburg. He passed an examination for the Diplomatic Service in September 1903.

#8616

Francis Utley

1907 - 1974 (67 years)

Francis Lee Utley was a folklorist, linguist, medievalist, scholar of onomastics and literature, educator, and author. Life and career Born and raised in Watertown, Wisconsin, Utley attended the University of Wisconsin, from which he graduated with honors in 1929. He did his graduate literary studies at Harvard, earning the M.A. in 1934 and the Ph.D. in 1936. At Harvard, he came under the influence of George Lyman Kittredge in English who encouraged Utley's study of folklore. In 1936, he married Ruth Alice Scott and they had three children: Philip Lee, Andrew Scott, and Jean Marie.

#8617

John Edwin Pomfret

John Edwin Pomfret

1898 - 1981 (83 years)

John Edwin Pomfret was an American academic and administrator who served as the director of the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery and the twentieth president of the College of William & Mary.

#8618

C. Doris Hellman

C. Doris Hellman

1910 - 1973 (63 years)

Clarisse Doris Hellman Pepper was an American historian of science, "one of the first professional historians of science in the United States". She specialized in 16th- and 17th-century astronomy, wrote a book on the Great Comet of 1577, and was the translator of another book, a biography of Johannes Kepler. She became a professor at the Pratt Institute and later at the Queens College, City University of New York, and was recognized by membership in several selective academic societies.

#8619

Hans-Joachim Schoeps

1909 - 1980 (71 years)

Hans-Joachim Schoeps was a German-Jewish historian of religion and religious philosophy. He was professor of religions and religious history at the University of Erlangen. Prior to World War II, Schoeps was leader of The German Vanguard , an organization of 150 Jewish students, national conservative anti-Zionists who sought total assimilation into the German nation.

#8620

John Bowle

1905 - 1988 (83 years)

John Edward Bowle was an English historian and writer. Education He was educated at Marlborough College. There his contemporaries included John Betjeman, who became a friend, and Anthony Blunt, about whom he was consistently negative. He was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was counted as an Aesthete. Bowle left Oxford with a Third in Modern History, 1927.

#8621

Cornelis de Kiewiet

Cornelis de Kiewiet

1902 - 1986 (84 years)

Cornelis Willem de Kiewiet was a Dutch-born American historian most notable for having served as president of Cornell University and the University of Rochester. Biography De Kiewiet was born in the Netherlands, but grew up in South Africa, where his father went as a diamond and gold-seeker and later worked as an employee of the Transvaal Republic's Railway. In the early 1920s, Cornelis earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and, in 1927, he earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of London.

#8622

C. L. Mowat

1911 - 1970 (59 years)

Charles Loch Mowat was a British-born American historian. Biography Mowat was educated at Marlborough College and St John's College, Oxford. In 1934 he emigrated to the United States, where he became an American citizen. From 1934 until 1936 he taught at the University of Minnesota. In 1936 he took up a position at the University of California, Los Angeles. His opposition to McCarthyism led to him leaving UCLA and taking a post at the University of Chicago in 1950. In 1958 he returned to Britain to be professor of history at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, a post he held until ...

#8623

Levette J. Davidson

1894 - 1957 (63 years)

Levette J. Davidson was a nationally acclaimed expert in folklore, especially that of Colorado and the West. He was born in Eureka, Illinois May 16, 1894, one of four children. Because his grand uncle was past-President of Eureka College, a Christian seminary, Davidson was reared in the school's shadow with the option of becoming either a teacher or a preacher. He chose teaching and was awarded his B.A. from Eureka in 1915. A year later he received his A.M. degree from the University of Illinois where he received Phi Beta Kappa honors. In 1917 he earned his M.A. in social science and history at Harvard University.

#8624

Antony Andrewes

1910 - 1990 (80 years)

Antony Andrewes, was an English classical scholar and historian. He was Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford from 1953 to 1977. Early life Andrewes was born in Tavistock, Devon, England, on 12 June 1910. He was educated at Winchester College from 1923 to 1929. He studied at New College, Oxford, between 1929 and 1933.

#8625

William Abel Pantin

1902 - 1973 (71 years)

William Abel Pantin was a historian of medieval England who spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford. Life Pantin was born in Blackheath, south London, on 1 May 1902. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class degree in Modern History in 1923. He undertook research at the University of Oxford after winning a Bryce Research Studentship.

#8626

Frank Underhill

1889 - 1971 (82 years)

Frank Hawkins Underhill, SM, FRSC was a Canadian journalist, essayist, historian, social critic, and political thinker. Biography Frank Underhill, born in Stouffville, Ontario, was educated at the University of Toronto and the University of Oxford in which he was a member of the Fabian Society. He was influenced by social and political critics such as George Bernard Shaw and Goldwin Smith. He taught history at the University of Saskatchewan from 1914 until 1927 with a long interruption during World War I during which he served as an officer in the Hertfordshire Regiment of the British Army on the Western Front.

#8627

Eric Thomas Stokes

1924 - 1981 (57 years)

Eric Thomas Stokes was a historian of South Asia, especially early-modern and colonial India, and of the British Empire. Stokes was the second holder of Smuts Professorship of the History of the British Commonwealth at the University of Cambridge.

#8628

Carlton J. H. Hayes

1882 - 1964 (82 years)

Carlton Joseph Huntley Hayes was an American historian, educator, diplomat, devout Catholic and academic. A student of European history, he was a leading and pioneering specialist on the study of nationalism. He was elected as president of the American Historical Association over the opposition of liberals and the more explicit Anti-Catholic bias that defined the academic community of his era. He served as United States Ambassador to Spain in World War II. Although he came under attack from the CIO and others on the left that rejected any dealings with Francoist Spain, Hayes succeeded in his...

#8629

Francis Dvornik

1893 - 1975 (82 years)

Francis Dvornik , in Czech František Dvorník, was a Catholic priest and academic. He is considered one of the leading twentieth-century experts on Slavic and Byzantine history, and on relations between the churches of Rome and Constantinople.

#8630

William Appleman Williams

1921 - 1990 (69 years)

William Appleman Williams was one of the 20th century's most prominent revisionist historians of American diplomacy. He achieved the height of his influence while on the faculty of the department of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is considered to be the foremost member of the "Wisconsin School" of diplomatic history.

#8631

David M. Potter

1910 - 1971 (61 years)

David Morris Potter was an American historian specializing in the study of the American Civil War, especially the Confederacy, and the American South in general. His best known book is The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, which was completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher and published posthumously in 1976.

#8632

Marcel Bataillon

1895 - 1977 (82 years)

Marcel Édouard Bataillon, was a French Hispanicist who specialized in the philosophy and spirituality of sixteenth-century Spain. Career He began his studies in 1913 at the École Normale Supérieure. This was followed by a term at l’École des Hautes Études Hispaniques in Madrid where he was a delegate to the "International Committee of Allied Propaganda". From 1916 to 1919 he was a lieutenant in the French artillery. He emerged from these experiences as a confirmed pacifist.

#8633

August C. Krey

1887 - 1961 (74 years)

August Charles Krey was an American medievalist. He was chairman of the Department of History at the University of Minnesota from 1944 to 1955. Biography Born in Germany, he immigrated to Wisconsin with his family as a child. He earned all his degrees from the University of Wisconsin between 1907 and 1914. He taught at the University of Texas and at the University of Illinois . In 1913, he joined the University of Minnesota, where he spent the rest of his career, heading the Department of History from 1944 until his retirement in 1955. He was a member of the council of the American Historica...

#8634

Julius W. Pratt

1888 - 1983 (95 years)

Julius William Pratt was a United States historian who specialized in foreign relations and imperialism. Noted for his studies of the origins of the War of 1812 and the war with Spain in 1898, he also wrote a two-volume biography of Cordell Hull. He was the historian who rediscovered John L. O'Sullivan and his role in originating the idea of Manifest Destiny.

#8635

J. P. V. D. Balsdon

1901 - 1977 (76 years)

John Percy Vyvian Dacre Balsdon, FBA , known as J. P. V. D. Balsdon in his academic work and otherwise as Dacre Balsdon, was an English ancient historian and writer. He was a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, from 1927 to 1969, and president of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies from 1968 to 1971.

#8636

Conyers Read

1881 - 1959 (78 years)

Conyers Read was an American historian who specialized in the History of England in the 15th and 16th centuries. A professor of history at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, he was president of the American Historical Association for the year 1949–1950.

#8637

Michael Flinn

1917 - 1983 (66 years)

Michael Walter Flinn was a British economic historian. Born into a middle-class family in Chorlton-on-Medlock, he was educated at William Hulme's Grammar School in Manchester, serving as an officer in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War. After the end of the war, Flinn took a history degree at the University of Manchester before spending two years as a grammar school teacher while writing a postgraduate dissertation in his spare time. In 1959, he began lecturing at the University of Edinburgh, writing an introductory school textbook for history in 1961, which was still in print at his death.

#8638

Joseph Ward Swain

1891 - 1971 (80 years)

#8639

Albert Howe Lybyer

1879 - 1949 (70 years)

Albert Howe Lybyer was a scholar of the history of the Middle East and the Balkans. Lybyer taught medieval and modern European history at Oberlin College from 1909 to 1913, and also held teaching positions at Robert College of Istanbul , Harvard University and the University of Illinois . He served as a technical advisor to the King–Crane Commission in 1919.

#8640

William Linn Westermann

William Linn Westermann

1873 - 1954 (81 years)

William Linn Westermann was an American historian and papyrologist who served as the president of the American Historical Association in 1944. He was regarded as an expert on the economy of the ancient world.

#8641

Sydney Checkland

1916 - 1986 (70 years)

Sydney George Checkland FRSE was a British-Canadian economic historian. Life Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Checkland worked at the Bank of Nova Scotia, then the Ottawa Sanitary Laundry Company, while he gained associate membership of the Canadian Bankers' Association. In 1938, he moved to England to study at the University of Birmingham, and in his final year served as President of the Guild of Students at the university. In 1941, he was elected as President of the National Union of Students, serving for only one year before becoming President of the International Council of Students.

#8642

Michael Crowder

1934 - 1988 (54 years)

Michael Crowder was a British historian and author notable for his books on the history of Africa and particularly on the history of West Africa. Early life and education Michael was born in London and educated at Mill Hill School. After earning a first class honours degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Hertford College, Oxford in 1957, he returned to Lagos to become first Editor of Nigeria Magazine in 1959.

#8643

John Tate Lanning

1902 - 1976 (74 years)

John Tate Lanning was a historian of Spanish America and held the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus position at Duke University. He was a major scholar of colonial Spanish American history and worked to strengthen organizations devoted to Latin American scholarship. In one obituary he was called, “a true giant” in the field. His work on the Spanish Enlightenment in Spanish America challenged received understandings of Spanish obscurantism.

#8644

Harold James Dyos

1921 - 1978 (57 years)

Harold James Dyos was a British historian, known for his contributions to urban history. He wrote many essays addressing the issue of urbanization. Career He graduated B.A. from the London School of Economics in 1949, and gained a Ph.D. there in 1952. He taught his entire career at the University of Leicester.

#8645

Stanley Pargellis

Stanley Pargellis

1898 - 1968 (70 years)

Stanley McCrory Pargellis was an American historian and librarian. His work as a historian focused mainly on the military history of the American colonial era. From 1942 to 1962, he was director of the Newberry Library in Chicago.

#8646

Frances Yates

1899 - 1981 (82 years)

Dame Frances Amelia Yates was an English historian of the Renaissance, who wrote books on the history of esotericism. After attaining an MA in French at University College London, she began to publish her research in scholarly journals and academic books, focusing on 16th-century theatre and the life of the linguist and lexicographer John Florio. In 1941, she was employed by the Warburg Institute in London, and began to work on what she termed "Warburgian history", emphasising a pan-European and inter-disciplinary approach to historiography.

#8647

Ernst Kantorowicz

1895 - 1963 (68 years)

Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz was a German historian of medieval political and intellectual history and art, known for his 1927 book Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite on Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and The King's Two Bodies on medieval and early modern ideologies of monarchy and the state. He was an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#8648

Ralph Marcus

1900 - 1956 (56 years)

Ralph Marcus was an American classical philologist and historian of Hellenistic Judaism and the Second Temple period. He is most known for his Loeb Classical Library translations of works of the Jewish authors Josephus and Philo of Alexandria from Koine Greek and Classical Armenian into English.

#8649

Peter Charanis

1905 - 1985 (80 years)

Peter Charanis , born Panagiotis Charanis , was a Greek-born American scholar of Byzantium and the Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University. Charanis was long associated with the Dumbarton Oaks research library.

#8650

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.

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