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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in History,
#8651
Franz Altheim
1898 - 1976 (78 years)
Franz Altheim was a German classical philologist and historian who specialized in the history of classical antiquity. During the 1930s and 1940s, Altheim served the Nazi state as a member of Ahnenerbe, a think tank controlled by the Schutzstaffel , the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, and as a spy for the SS.
Go to Profile#8652
Tyler Dennett
1883 - 1949 (66 years)
Tyler Dennett was an American historian and educator. He received the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1933 book John Hay: From Poetry to Politics. Early career and education Born in Wisconsin, but raised in Rhode Island, Dennett graduated high school as valedictorian from the Moses Brown School in Providence. In 1900, Dennett enrolled at Bates College and then transferred to Williams College as a sophomore. At Williams, he was a member of the football team. After his graduation in the spring of 1904 and a year of work in Williamstown, Massachusetts he attended the Union Theological Seminary, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Divinity in 1908.
Go to Profile#8653
Friedrich Lütge
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Friedrich Lütge was a German economist, social historian and economic historian. He taught at the Leipzig Graduate School of Management and at the University of Leipzig between 1940 and 1947, then moving on to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where he taught till a few months before he died. Through his research work between 1949 and 1968 he exercised a great influence on the understanding of economic history in West Germany. Together with Wilhelm Abel and Günther Franz he contributed decisively to research into agrarian history in Germany. He was instrumental in ensuring that soci...
Go to Profile#8654
W. N. Medlicott
1900 - 1987 (87 years)
William Norton Medlicott was a British historian. He was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham College, University College London and the Institute of Historical Research. In 1926 Medlicott took up a post at University College, Swansea and in 1936 he married Dorothy Kathleen Coveney. Medlicott worked at the Board of Trade for the first year of the Second World War before being selected by Sir Keith Hancock to be a member of the Cabinet Office Historical Section. Medlicott published the results of his research in his two-volume work The Economic Blockade.
Go to Profile#8655
Anthony Blunt
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Anthony Frederick Blunt , styled Sir Anthony Blunt KCVO from 1956 to November 1979, was a leading British art historian and Soviet spy. Blunt was a professor of art history at the University of London, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. His 1967 monograph on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin is still widely regarded as a watershed book in art history. His teaching text and reference work Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, first published in 1953, reached its fifth edition in 1999, at which time it was still considered the best ...
Go to Profile#8656
Eleanora Carus-Wilson
1897 - 1977 (80 years)
Eleanora Mary Carus-Wilson, FBA was a British economic historian. Known for her work on rural Medieval textile industries in England, she made significant contributions to the understanding of that technology in the region.
Go to Profile#8657
Roberto Weiss
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Roberto Weiss was an Italian-British scholar and historian who specialised in the fields of Italian-English cultural contacts during the period of the Renaissance, and of Renaissance humanism. Early career Weiss was born in Milan, Italy. After spending his later childhood in Rome, he came to Britain to study law at Oxford University. He worked for a short time from 1932 to 1933 in the Department of Western Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, and obtained his D.Phil from Oxford in 1934, in the same year winning the Charles Oldham prize. He was naturalised British in 1934. The author John Buchan became his friend and mentor.
Go to Profile#8658
William B. Hesseltine
1902 - 1963 (61 years)
William Best Hesseltine was an American historian and politician. As a historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for nearly three decades, Hesseltine's field of expertise was mid-19th century American history, especially the Civil War, Reconstruction Era and American South. He also became known as the mentor of a generation of American historians, many of whom also won prizes for their writing.
Go to Profile#8659
John Shelton Curtiss
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
John Shelton Curtiss , was an American historian of Russia and historical scholar of old Yankee stock. Curtiss was a longtime professor of history at Duke University. Early life and education John Shelton Curtiss was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of prominent attorney, Harlow Clarke Curtiss and his socialite wife, Ethel Curtiss. His maternal grandfather was Dr. Matthew D. Mann.
Go to Profile#8660
Walter Prescott Webb
1888 - 1963 (75 years)
Walter Prescott Webb was an American historian noted for his groundbreaking work on the American West. As president of the Texas State Historical Association, he launched the project that produced the Handbook of Texas. He is a member of the Hall of Great Westerners, which is a part of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
Go to Profile#8661
Horace Mann Bond
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Horace Mann Bond was an American historian, college administrator, social science researcher and the father of civil-rights leader Julian Bond. He earned graduate and doctoral degrees from University of Chicago at a time when only a small percentage of any young adults attended any college. He was an influential leader at several historically black colleges and was appointed the first president of Fort Valley State University in Georgia in 1939, where he managed its growth in programs and revenue. In 1945, he became the first African-American president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#8662
Garrett Mattingly
1900 - 1962 (62 years)
Garrett Mattingly was a professor of European history at Columbia University who specialized in early modern diplomatic history. In 1960 he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Defeat of the Spanish Armada.
Go to Profile#8663
W. L. Morton
1908 - 1980 (72 years)
William Lewis Morton was a Canadian historian who specialized in the development of the Canadian west. Along with Arthur R. M. Lower and Donald Creighton he is regarded as one of the dominant Canadian historians of his generation.
Go to Profile#8664
Fawn M. Brodie
1915 - 1981 (66 years)
Fawn McKay Brodie was an American biographer and one of the first female professors of history at UCLA, who is best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History , a work of psychobiography, and No Man Knows My History , an early biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.
Go to Profile#8665
William Croft Dickinson
1897 - 1963 (66 years)
William Croft Dickinson, CBE MC was a leading expert in the history of early modern Scotland and a writer of both children's fiction and adult ghost stories. Dickinson held the Chair of Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh from 1943 to 1963.
Go to Profile#8666
Wayland Hand
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Wayland Debs Hand was an American folklorist. Biography Hand was born in New Zealand, where his parents had emigrated. A few years after his birth, the family returned to Utah, where Hand grew up. He attended the University of Utah, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees in German in 1933 and 1934. He then earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1936, writing his dissertation on German folk songs.
Go to Profile#8667
William Yandell Elliott
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
William Yandell Elliott was an American historian and a political advisor to six US presidents. Biography Born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, he served as an artillery battery commander in World War I. He attended Vanderbilt University, where he was a member of the group of poets and literary scholars known as the Fugitives. As a Rhodes Scholar, he attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and, among others, would meet the poet William Butler Yeats, the Indian nationalist Krishna Menon, and John Marshall Harlan II, a future Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Go to Profile#8668
George Williams Brown
1894 - 1963 (69 years)
George Williams Brown was a Canadian historian and editor. Born on April 3, 1894, in Glencoe, Middlesex County, Ontario, and died on October 19, 1963, in Ottawa, Ontario. Early life and education The son of Charles William Brown, a Methodist and United Church of Canada minister, and Ida Rebecca Brown, he grew up in Southwestern Ontario, Saskatchewan and British Columbia. After graduating in history from Victoria College, University of Toronto in 1915, he joined the Canadian Army but was invalided out and taught for a year in a Dukhobor community in Saskatchewan. He re-enlisted as a Lieutenant in the Canadian Tanks Corps, but World War I ended before he saw active service.
Go to Profile#8669
Robert G. McCloskey
1916 - 1968 (52 years)
Robert Green McCloskey was an American political historian. McCloskey completed his doctorate in political science at Harvard University, and joined the faculty in 1948. He was secretary of the Littauer Center of Public Administration until 1954, when Arthur Maass took the position. McCloskey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. In 1966, McCloskey was named Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History and Government at Harvard. The position had been vacant since 1963, upon the death of V. O. Key. McCloskey died on 4 August 1969.
Go to Profile#8670
Hajo Holborn
1902 - 1969 (67 years)
Hajo Holborn was a German-American historian and specialist in modern German history. Early life Hajo Holborn was born the son of Ludwig Holborn, the German physicist and "Direktor der Physikalisch-Technischen Reichsanstalt," and became a student of Friedrich Meinecke at Berlin University, where he achieved a doctor of philosophy in 1924. After establishing at Heidelberg in 1926 as lecturer in medieval and modern history, he became Privatdozent there until he was called back to Berlin as Carnegie Professor of History and International Relationships at the private Deutsche Hochschule für Politik.
Go to Profile