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 …
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List of the most influential people in History,
#101
Tariq Ali
#884
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Tariq Ali is a Pakistani-British political activist, writer, journalist, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and Sin Permiso, and contributes to The Guardian, CounterPunch, and the London Review of Books. He studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Exeter College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#102
Carolyn Merchant
#2675
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Carolyn Merchant is an American ecofeminist philosopher and historian of science most famous for her theory on The Death of Nature, whereby she identifies the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century as the period when science began to atomize, objectify, and dissect nature, foretelling its eventual conception as composed of inert atomic particles. Her works are important in the development of environmental history and the history of science. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at UC Berkeley.
Go to Profile#103
Omeljan Pritsak
#5544
Overall Influence
1919 - 2006 (87 years)
Omeljan Yosypovych Pritsak was the first Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University and the founder and first director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Career From 1921 till 1936 he lived in Ternopil, where he graduated the state Polish gymnasium. Pritsak began his academic career at the University of Lviv in interwar Poland where he studied Middle Eastern languages under local orientalists and became associated with the Shevchenko Scientific Society and attended its seminar on Ukrainian history led by Ivan Krypiakevych. After the Soviet annexation ...
Go to Profile#104
Robert Paxton
#1940
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Robert Owen Paxton is an American political scientist and historian specializing in Vichy France, fascism, and Europe during the World War II era. He is Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is best known for his 1972 book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, which precipitated intense debate in France, and led to a paradigm shift in how the events of the Vichy regime are interpreted.
Go to Profile#105
Wallace Stegner
#1924
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Wallace Earle Stegner was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.
Go to Profile#106
Christopher Hill
#4277
Overall Influence
1912 - 2003 (91 years)
John Edward Christopher Hill was an English Marxist historian and academic, specialising in 17th-century English history. From 1965 to 1978 he was Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Early life and education Christopher Hill was born on 6 February 1912, Bishopthorpe Road, York, to Edward Harold Hill and Janet Augusta . His father was a solicitor and the family were devout Methodists. He attended St Peter's School, York. At the age of 16, he sat his entrance examination at Balliol College, Oxford. The two history tutors who marked his papers recognised his ability and offered him a place in order to forestall any chance he might go to the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#107
Timothy Garton Ash
#1435
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Timothy Garton Ash is a British historian, author and commentator. He is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. Most of his work has been concerned with the contemporary history of Europe, with a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe.
Go to Profile#108
Ben Kiernan
#997
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Benedict F. "Ben" Kiernan is an Australian-born American academic and historian who is the Whitney Griswold Professor Emeritus of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University.
Go to Profile#109
John Lukacs
#3829
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
John Adalbert Lukacs was a Hungarian-born American historian and author of more than thirty books. Lukacs described himself as a reactionary. Life and career Lukacs was born in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Magdaléna Glück and Pál Lukács , a physician. His parents, Jewish converts to Roman Catholicism, were divorced before World War II. Lukacs attended a classical gymnasium, had an English language tutor, and spent two summers at a private school in England. He studied history at the University of Budapest.
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David Brion Davis
#2906
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
David Brion Davis was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and founder and director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
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David Halberstam
#1407
Overall Influence
1934 - 2007 (73 years)
David Halberstam was an American writer, journalist, and historian, known for his work on the Vietnam War, politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, Korean War, and later, sports journalism. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964. Halberstam was killed in a car crash in 2007, while doing research for a book.
Go to Profile#112
Anthony Grafton
#4576
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
#113
Orlando Figes
#3239
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
#114
Roy Porter
#3450
Overall Influence
1946 - 2002 (56 years)
Roy Sydney Porter, FBA was a British historian known for his work on the history of medicine. He retired in 2001 from the director of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine at University College London .
Go to Profile#115
Christopher Clark
#3942
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
<onlyinclude></onlyinclude> Education and academic positions Clark was educated at Sydney Grammar School from 1972 to 1978, the University of Sydney and the Freie Universität Berlin from 1985 to 1987.
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Daniel Walker Howe
#9399
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Daniel Walker Howe is an American historian who specializes in the early national period of U.S. history, with a particular interest in its intellectual and religious dimensions. He was Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University in England and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History for What Hath God Wrought , his most famous book. He was president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in 2001, and is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal H...
Go to Profile#117
Carlo M. Cipolla
#9774
Overall Influence
1922 - 2000 (78 years)
Carlo M. Cipolla was an Italian economic historian. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Biography As a young man, Cipolla wanted to teach history and philosophy in an Italian high school, and therefore enrolled at the political science faculty at the University of Pavia. While a student there, thanks to professor Franco Borlandi, a specialist in medieval economic history, he discovered his passion for economic history. He graduated from Pavia in 1944. Subsequently, he studied at the University of Paris and the London School...
Go to Profile#118
Drew Gilpin Faust
#1405
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian who served as the 28th president of Harvard University, the first woman in that role. She was Harvard's first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard and the first to have been raised in the South. Faust is also the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has been ranked among the world's most powerful women by Forbes, including as the 33rd most powerful in 2014.
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Oscar Handlin
#6053
Overall Influence
1915 - 2011 (96 years)
Oscar Handlin was an American historian. As a professor of history at Harvard University for over 50 years, he directed 80 PhD dissertations and helped promote social and ethnic history, virtually inventing the field of immigration history in the 1950s. Handlin won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Uprooted . Handlin's 1965 testimony before Congress was said to "have played an important role" in passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that abolished the discriminatory immigration quota system in the US.
Go to Profile#120
Samuel Moyn
#3325
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
#121
Lynn Hunt
#4365
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Lynn Avery Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her area of expertise is the French Revolution, but she is also well known for her work in European cultural history on such topics as gender. Her 2007 work, Inventing Human Rights, has been heralded as the most comprehensive analysis of the history of human rights. She served as president of the American Historical Association in 2002.
Go to Profile#122
Stephan Thernstrom
#5236
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Stephan Thernstrom is an American academic and historian who is the Winthrop Research Professor of History Emeritus at Harvard University. He is a specialist in ethnic and social history and was the editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. He and his wife Abigail Thernstrom are prominent opponents of affirmative action in education and according to the New York Times, they "lead the conservative charge against racial preference in America."
Go to Profile#123
Jonathan Israel
#2504
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jonathan Irvine Israel is a British historian specialising in Dutch history, the Age of Enlightenment, Spinoza's Philosophy and European Jews. Israel was appointed as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, in January 2001 and retired in July 2016. He was previously Professor of Dutch History and Institutions at the University College London.
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Harold James
#6834
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Harold James is an economic historian specialising in the history of Germany and European economic history. He is a Professor of History at Princeton University as well as the university's Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He currently writes monthly columns for Project Syndicate covering economic history. He is also a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
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Kenneth T. Jackson
#6672
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Kenneth Terry Jackson is a professor emeritus of history and social sciences at Columbia University. A frequent television guest, he is best known as an urban historian and a preeminent authority on the history of New York City, where he lives on the Upper West Side.
Go to Profile#126
Michael Lind
#2362
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Michael Lind is an American writer and academic. He has explained and defended the tradition of American democratic nationalism in a number of books, beginning with The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution . He is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Pierre Chaunu
#9441
Overall Influence
1923 - 2009 (86 years)
Pierre Chaunu was a French historian. His specialty was Latin American history; he also studied French social and religious history of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. A leading figure in French quantitative history as the founder of "serial history", he was professor emeritus at Paris IV-Sorbonne, a member of the Institut de France, and a commander of the Légion d'Honneur. A convert to Protestantism from Roman Catholicism, he defended his far-right views most notably in a longtime column in Le Figaro and on Radio Courtoisie.
Go to Profile#128
Joseph Ellis
#5037
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Joseph John-Michael Ellis III is an American historian whose work focuses on the lives and times of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His book American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson won a National Book Award in 1997 and Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for History. Both these books were bestsellers.
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Ira Berlin
#7014
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Ira Berlin was an American historian, professor of history at the University of Maryland, and former president of Organization of American Historians. Berlin is the author of such books as Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America and Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves .
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Joan Wallach Scott
#3101
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Joan Wallach Scott is an American historian of France with contributions in gender history. She is a professor emerita in the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Scott is known for her work in feminist history and gender theory, engaging post-structural theory on these topics. Geographically, her work focuses primarily on France, and thematically she deals with how power works, the relation between language and experience, and the role and practice of historians. Her work grapples with theory's application to historical and current events, f...
Go to Profile#131
Avi Shlaim
#2401
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Avi Shlaim is an Israeli and British historian of Iraqi Jewish descent. He is one of Israel's "New Historians", a group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel.
Go to Profile#132
Yehuda Bauer
#1512
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Yehuda Bauer is a Czech-born Israeli historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Gordon A. Craig
#4295
Overall Influence
1913 - 2005 (92 years)
Gordon Alexander Craig was a Scottish-American liberal historian of German history and of diplomatic history. Early life Craig was born in Glasgow. In 1925 he emigrated with his family to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and then to Jersey City, New Jersey. Initially interested in studying the law, he switched to history after hearing the historian Walter "Buzzer" Hall lecture at Princeton University. In 1935, Craig visited and lived for several months in Germany, to research a thesis he was writing on the downfall of the Weimar Republic. This trip marked the beginning of lifelong interest with all things German.
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Robin Kelley
#10631
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles . From 2006 to 2011, he was Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California , and from 2003 to 2006 he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University. From 1994 to 2003, he was a professor of history and Africana Studies at New York University as well the chair of NYU's history department from 2002 to 2003. Kelley has also served as a Hess Scholar-in-Residence at Brooklyn College.
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Sumit Sarkar
#8579
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Sumit Sarkar is an Indian historian of modern India. He is the author of Swadeshi Movement. Early life, education and career He was born to Susobhan Sarkar. His maternal uncle was Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.
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Pierre Nora
#2495
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Pierre Nora is a French historian elected to the Académie française on 7 June 2001. He is known for his work on French identity and memory. His name is associated with the study of new history. He is the brother of the late Simon Nora, a former senior French administrative professional.
Go to Profile#137
Alfred W. Crosby
#8441
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Alfred Worcester Crosby Jr. was professor of History, Geography, and American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and University of Helsinki. He was the author of books including The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism . In these works, he provided biological and geographical explanations for the question why Europeans were able to succeed with relative ease in what he referred to as the "Neo-Europes" of Australasia, North America, and southern South America. America's Forgotten Pandemic is the first major critical history of the 1918 "Spanish" Flu.
Go to Profile#138
Natalie Zemon Davis
#6182
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Natalie Zemon Davis, was an American-Canadian historian of the early modern period. She was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University. Her work originally focused on France, but it later broadened to include other parts of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. For example, her book, Trickster Travels , views Italy, Spain, Morocco and other parts of North Africa and West Africa through the lens of Leo Africanus's pioneering geography. Davis' books have all been translated into other languages: twenty-two for The Return of Martin Guerre. She was the second female ...
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Michael Kazin
#5296
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Michael Kazin is an American historian, and professor at Georgetown University. He is co-editor of Dissent magazine. Early life Kazin was born in New York City in 1948 and was raised in Englewood, New Jersey. He is the son of literary critic Alfred Kazin, and step-son of structural engineer Mario Salvadori.
Go to Profile#140
Jacques Barzun
#864
Overall Influence
1907 - 2012 (105 years)
Jacques Martin Barzun was a French-born American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and classical music, and was also known as a philosopher of education. In the book Teacher in America , Barzun influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States.
Go to Profile#141
Shelby Foote
#3541
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Shelby Dade Foote Jr. was an American writer, historian and journalist. Although he primarily viewed himself as a novelist, he is now best known for his authorship of The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the American Civil War.
Go to Profile#142
Kenneth Pomeranz
#7755
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#143
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
#1612
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has published extensively on the recognition of African-American literature as part of the Western canon.
Go to Profile#144
Walter Laqueur
#3729
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Walter Ze'ev Laqueur was a German-born American historian, journalist and political commentator. He was an influential scholar on the subjects of terrorism and political violence. Biography Walter Laqueur was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia, Germany , into a Jewish family. In November 1938 he left Germany, immigrating to the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, were murdered in the Holocaust. After less than a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he left to work as an agricultural laborer and guard. In 1942 he became a member of kibbutz HaZore'a.
Go to Profile#145
Stanley Karnow
#1737
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Stanley Abram Karnow was an American journalist and historian. He is best known for his writings on East Asia and the Vietnam War. Education and career Karnow was born in Brooklyn in 1925, and had a middle-class, secular Jewish upbringing. His father was a machinery salesman; his mother, an immigrant from Hungary, a homemaker. Interested in writing from a young age, at James Madison High School in Brooklyn he wrote radio plays and was a sports writer and an editor of the school paper.
Go to Profile#146
James MacGregor Burns
#1999
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
James MacGregor Burns was an American historian and political scientist, presidential biographer, and authority on leadership studies. He was the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government Emeritus at Williams College and Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1971 Burns received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in History and Biography for his work on America's 32nd president, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom.
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Sheila Fitzpatrick
#5446
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Sheila Mary Fitzpatrick is an Australian historian, whose main subjects are history of the Soviet Union and history of modern Russia, especially the Stalin era and the Great Purges, of which she proposes a "history from below", and is part of the "revisionist school" of Communist historiography. She has also critically reviewed the concept of totalitarianism and highlighted the differences between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in debates about comparison of Nazism and Stalinism.
Go to Profile#148
Hew Strachan
#6927
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Sir Hew Francis Anthony Strachan , is a British military historian, well known for his leadership in scholarly studies of the British Army and the history of the First World War. He is currently professor of international relations at the University of St Andrews. Before that Strachan was the Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#149
Paul Johnson
#1819
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Paul Bede Johnson was an English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter and author. Although associated with the political left in his early career, he became a popular conservative historian.
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Jeffrey Burton Russell
#4450
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
Jeffrey Burton Russell was an American historian of medieval Europe and religious studies scholar. Early life Russell received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1955 and his PhD in History from Emory University in 1960.
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