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,
#201
Eberhard Jäckel
#7020
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Eberhard Jäckel was a German historian. In the 1980s, he was a principal protagonist in the Historians' Dispute over how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography and over Hitler's intentions.
Go to Profile#202
Stéphane Courtois
#4420
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Stéphane Courtois is a French historian and university professor, a director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research , professor at the Catholic Institute of Higher Studies in La Roche-sur-Yon, and director of a collection specialized in the history of communist movements and communist states.
Go to Profile#203
Paul Cartledge
#9800
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Paul Anthony Cartledge is a British ancient historian and academic. From 2008 to 2014 he was the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He had previously held a personal chair in Greek History at Cambridge.
Go to Profile#204
Shlomo Sand
#4106
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Shlomo Sand is an Israeli Emeritus Professor of History at Tel Aviv University. Biography Sand was born in Linz, Austria, to Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. His cultural background was grounded in Yiddish culture. His father, having taken an aversion to rabbis, abandoned his Talmudic studies at a yeshiva and dropped attendance at synagogues, after his mother was denied a front seat after her husband's death, and they could not afford the seat price. Both his parents had Communist and anti-imperialist views and refused to accept compensation from Germany for their suffering during the Second World War.
Go to Profile#205
Jean Edward Smith
#5154
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Jean Edward Smith was a biographer and the John Marshall Professor of Political Science at Marshall University. He was also professor emeritus at the University of Toronto after having served as professor of political economy there for thirty-five years. Smith was also on the faculty of the Master of American History and Government program at Ashland University.
Go to Profile#206
Walter Goffart
#14137
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Walter Andre Goffart is a German-born American historian who specializes in Late Antiquity and the European Middle Ages. He taught for many years in the history department and Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto , and is currently a senior research scholar at Yale University. He is the author of monographs on a ninth-century forgery , late Roman taxation , four "barbarian" historians, and historical atlases.
Go to Profile#207
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#5042
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore is a British historian, television presenter and author of popular history books and novels, including Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar , Jerusalem: The Biography , The Romanovs 1613–1918 , and The World: A Family History of Humanity , among others.
Go to Profile#208
Kamal Salibi
#8852
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Kamal Suleiman Salibi was a Lebanese historian, professor of history at the American University of Beirut and the founding Director of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies in Amman, Jordan. He was a lifetime bachelor, who devoted his life to books.
Go to Profile#209
Henry Rousso
#8438
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Henry Rousso is an Egyptian-born French historian specializing in World War II France. Early life Henry Rousso was born on 23 November 1954 in Cairo, Egypt, to a Jewish family. Forced out of Egypt under anti-Semitic measures instituted by the Nasser regime, and stripped of Egyptian nationality, they fled to France in 1956.
Go to Profile#210
Hagen Schulze
#11643
Overall Influence
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
Hagen Schulze was a German historian who held a position at the Free University of Berlin. He specialized in early modern and modern German and European history, particularly in comparative European nationalisms.
Go to Profile#211
Stanley G. Payne
#1725
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Stanley George Payne is an American historian of modern Spain and European Fascism at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He retired from full-time teaching in 2004 and is currently Professor Emeritus at its Department of History.
Go to Profile#212
Robert Service
#4376
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Robert John Service is a post-revisionist British historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the era from the October Revolution to Stalin's death. He was until 2013 a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is best known for his biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. He has been a fellow of the British Academy since 1998.
Go to Profile#213
Martin Bernal
#7794
Overall Influence
1937 - 2013 (76 years)
Martin Gardiner Bernal was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history. He was a Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is best known for his work Black Athena, a controversial work which argues that the culture, language, and political structure of Ancient Greece contained substantial influences from Egypt and Syria-Palestine.
Go to Profile#214
Daniel Pipes
#2273
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Daniel Pipes is an American commentator on foreign policy and the Middle East. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the Middle East as well as criticism of Islam.
Go to Profile#215
I. Bernard Cohen
#4628
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
I. Bernard Cohen was the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the history of science at Harvard University and the author of many books on the history of science and, in particular, Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin.
Go to Profile#216
Herwig Wolfram
#10640
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Herwig Wolfram is an Austrian historian who is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History and Auxiliary Sciences of History at the University of Vienna and the former Director of the . He is a leading member of the Vienna School of History, and internationally known for his authoritative works on the history of Austria, the Goths, and relationships between the Germanic peoples and the Roman Empire.
Go to Profile#217
Ikuhiko Hata
#5252
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Ikuhiko Hata is a Japanese historian. He earned his PhD at the University of Tokyo and has taught history at several universities. He is the author of a number of influential and well-received scholarly works, particularly on topics related to Japan's role in the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.
Go to Profile#218
Golo Mann
#5077
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Golo Mann was a popular German historian and essayist. Having completed a doctorate in philosophy under Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, in 1933 he fled Hitler's Germany. He followed his father, the writer Thomas Mann and other members of his family in emigrating to France, Switzerland and the United States. From the late 1950s he re-established himself in Switzerland and West Germany as a literary historian.
Go to Profile#219
Stephen Kotkin
#4998
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Stephen Mark Kotkin is an American historian, academic, and author. He is the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. For 33 years, Kotkin taught at Princeton University, where he attained the title of John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs, and he took emeritus status from Princeton University in 2022. He was the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the co-director of the certificate program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy.
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Jackson J. Spielvogel
#16350
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Jackson Joseph Spielvogel is Associate Professor Emeritus of History at Pennsylvania State University. His textbooks on world history, Western civilization and Nazi Germany are widely adopted in middle school, high school, and college history courses throughout the United States. Spielvogel holds a Ph.D. from Ohio State University where he specialized in Reformation history under the supervision of Harold J. Grimm.
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René Girard
#550
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
René Noël Théophile Girard was a French polymath, historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Girard was the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.
Go to Profile#222
Ronald Inden
#3393
Overall Influence
Ronald B. Inden is a professor emeritus in the Departments of History and of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and is a major scholar in South Asian and post-colonial studies. Inden has been a lifelong resident of Hyde Park, the Chicago community which contains the University.
Go to Profile#223
David Levering Lewis
#5688
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
David Levering Lewis is an American historian, a Julius Silver University Professor, and professor emeritus of history at New York University. He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, for part one and part two of his biography of W. E. B. Du Bois . He is the first author to win Pulitzer Prizes for biography for two successive volumes on the same subject.
Go to Profile#224
Mark Mazower
#5968
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Mark Mazower is a British historian. His areas of expertise are Greece, the Balkans and, more generally, 20th-century Europe. He is Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University in New York City.
Go to Profile#225
Dominick LaCapra
#13576
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Dominick LaCapra is an American-born historian of European intellectual history, best known for his work in intellectual history and trauma studies. He served as the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University, where he is now a professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#226
Efraim Karsh
#3885
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Efraim Karsh is an Israeli and British historian who is the founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. Since 2013, he has served as professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University . He is also a principal research fellow and former director of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank. He is a vocal critic of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have questioned the traditional Israeli narrative of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Go to Profile#227
Peter Brown
#8305
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Peter Robert Lamont Brown is an Irish historian. He is the Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. Brown is credited with having brought coherence to the field of Late Antiquity, and is often regarded as the inventor of said field. His work has concerned, in particular, the religious culture of the later Roman Empire and early medieval Europe, and the relation between religion and society.
Go to Profile#228
Akira Iriye
#11724
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
is a historian of diplomatic history, international, and transnational history. He taught at University of Chicago and Harvard University until his retirement in 2005. In 1988 he served as president of the American Historical Association, the only Japanese citizen to do so, and also served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. In 2005, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver Star, one of Japan's highest civilian honors. He was also awarded Japan's Yoshida Shigeru Prize for best book in public history. He has been a member of the Amer...
Go to Profile#229
Richard White
#10121
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Richard White is an American historian who is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus at Stanford University. Earlier in his career, he taught at the University of Washington, University of Utah, and Michigan State University.
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Stephen F. Cohen
#4069
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Stephen Frand Cohen was an American scholar of Russian studies. His academic work concentrated on modern Russian history since the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's relationship with the United States.
Go to Profile#231
J. Arch Getty
#5451
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
John Archibald Getty III is an American historian and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles , who specializes in the history of Russia and the history of the Soviet Union. Life and career Getty was born in Louisiana and grew up in Oklahoma. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and his Ph.D. from Boston College in 1979. Getty was a professor at the University of California, Riverside, before he moved to UCLA.
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Élisabeth Roudinesco
#686
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Élisabeth Roudinesco is a French scholar, historian and psychoanalyst. She conducts a seminar on the history of psychoanalysis at the École Normale Supérieure. Roudinesco's work focuses mainly on psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis in France, but also worldwide. She has written biographies of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. Her biography of Freud, Freud, In his Time and Ours, was awarded the "Prix Décembre" 2014 and The "Prix des Prix" 2014. With Michel Plon, she published a huge Dictionary of Psychoanalysis , which was translated into many languages, though not yet into English. Her book Généalogies was awarded The Best Book Prize by The Société française d'histoire de la médecine.
Go to Profile#233
Arno J. Mayer
#6898
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Arno Joseph Mayer is an American historian who specializes in modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust, and is currently the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University.
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Donald Kagan
#11202
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Donald Kagan was a Lithuanian-born American historian and classicist at Yale University specializing in ancient Greece. He formerly taught in the Department of History at Cornell University. Kagan was considered among the foremost American scholars of Greek history and is notable for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War.
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David Herbert Donald
#7568
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
David Herbert Donald was an American historian, best known for his 1995 biography of Abraham Lincoln. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for earlier works; he published more than 30 books on United States political and literary figures and the history of the American South.
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Christopher Ehret
#7790
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Christopher Ehret , who currently holds the position of Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, is an American scholar of African history and African historical linguistics particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record. He has published ten books, most recently History and the Testimony of Language and A Dictionary of Sandawe , the latter co-edited with his wife, Patricia Ehret. He has written around seventy scholarly articles on a wide range of historical, linguistic, and anthropological subjects. These works include ...
Go to Profile#237
Robert Gerwarth
#16792
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Robert Gerwarth is a German historian and author who specialises in European history, with an emphasis on German history. Since finishing a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford, he has held fellowships at Princeton, Harvard, the NIOD and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia. He teaches at University College Dublin , Ireland.
Go to Profile#238
Heinrich August Winkler
#7110
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Heinrich August Winkler is a German historian. With his mother he joined the westward flight in 1944, after which he grew up in southern Germany, attending a Gymnasium in Ulm. He then studied history, political science, philosophy and public law at Münster, Heidelberg and Tübingen. In 1970 he became professor at the Free University of Berlin. From 1972 to 1991 he was professor at the University of Freiburg. Since 1991 he has held a chair of modern history at the Humboldt University Berlin. He has been a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany since 1962, and has ties to numerous prominent politicians within that party, including former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
Go to Profile#239
Steven Runciman
#5322
Overall Influence
1903 - 2000 (97 years)
Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman , known as Steven Runciman, was an English historian best known for his three-volume A History of the Crusades . His works had a profound impact on the popular conception of the Crusades.
Go to Profile#240
Kenneth O. Morgan
#4271
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Kenneth Owen Morgan, Baron Morgan, is a Welsh historian and author, known especially for his writings on modern British history and politics and on Welsh history. He is a regular reviewer and broadcaster on radio and television. He has been an influential intellectual resource in the Labour Party.
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Gyan Prakash
#8939
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gyan Prakash is a historian of modern India and the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. Prakash is a member of the Subaltern Studies collective. Prakash received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Delhi in 1973, his Master's degree in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1975, and his doctorate in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. His field of research concerns urban modernity, genealogies of modernity, and problems of postcolonial thought and politics. He writes about modern South Asian history, comparative colonialism and postcolonial theory, urban history, global history, and the history of science.
Go to Profile#242
Pierre Goubert
#10967
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Pierre Goubert was a French historian. A member of the Annales School, he is considered one of the founders of historical demography and modern rural history. He was a noted specialist on the 17th century, especially of the Ancien Régime societies and mentalities.
Go to Profile#243
Saul Friedländer
#4300
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Saul Friedländer is a Czech-Jewish-born historian and a professor emeritus of history at UCLA. Biography Saul Friedländer was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews. He was raised in France and lived through the German Occupation of 1940–1944. From 1942 until 1946, Friedländer was hidden in a Catholic boarding school in Montluçon, near Vichy. While in hiding, he converted to Roman Catholicism and later began preparing for the Catholic priesthood. His parents attempted to flee to Switzerland, were arrested instead by Vichy French gendarmes, turned over to the Germans and were gassed at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Go to Profile#244
Tapan Raychaudhuri
#7331
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
Tapan Raychaudhuri was a British-Indian historian specialising in British Indian history, Indian economic history and the History of Bengal. Early life and education He was the son of Prativa and Amiya Kumar Raychaudhuri, the last zamindar of Kirtipasha in Barisal district of eastern Bengal. He came from a well-known Baidya family. He was a nephew of Kiran Shankar Roy and Hem Chandra Roychaudhuri, through his paternal aunts.
Go to Profile#245
Noel Malcolm
#6787
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Sir Noel Robert Malcolm, is an English political journalist, historian and academic, currently a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. A King's Scholar at Eton College, Malcolm read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and received his doctorate in history from Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a Fellow and College Lecturer of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before becoming a political and foreign affairs journalist for The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph.
Go to Profile#246
Sally Alexander
#12677
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sally A. Alexander is an English historian and feminist activist. Career When she was sixteen, Alexander trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art as an actress. She completed a diploma in history at Ruskin College, Oxford from 1968 to 1970, before earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in the same subject from University College London. While studying, she worked on The Black Dwarf, a radical newspaper. She helped to organise the United Kingdom's first National Women's Liberation Conference in 1970 at Ruskin College, as an activist with the Women's Liberation Movement. She was also an organiser of the 1970 Miss World protest.
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Basil Davidson
#6958
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Basil Risbridger Davidson was a British journalist and historian who wrote more than 30 books on African history and politics. According to two modern writers, "Davidson, a campaigning journalist whose first of many books on African history and politics appeared in 1956, remains perhaps the single-most effective disseminator of the new field to a popular international audience".
Go to Profile#248
Dimitri Kitsikis
#4337
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Dimitri Kitsikis was a Greek Philosopher, Turkologist and Sinologist, as well as a Professor of International Relations and Geopolitics. He also published poetry in French and Greek. Life Dimitri Kitsikis was a Turkologist and Sinologist Professor of International Relations and Geopolitics at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada since 1970, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; he received his doctoral degree in 1963 from the Sorbonne, Paris, under the supervision of Pierre Renouvin. He has been named one of the "three top geopolitical thinkers worldwide, Karl Haushofer, Halford Mackinder and Dimitri Kitsikis".
Go to Profile#249
Herbert Aptheker
#6466
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Herbert Aptheker was an American Marxist historian and political activist. He wrote more than 50 books, mostly in the fields of African-American history and general U.S. history, most notably, American Negro Slave Revolts , a classic in the field. He also compiled the 7-volume Documentary History of the Negro People . In addition, he compiled a wide variety of primary documents supporting study of African-American history. He was the literary executor for W. E. B. Du Bois.
Go to Profile#250
Paul Veyne
#3190
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Paul Veyne was a French historian, and a specialist of Ancient Rome. A student of the École Normale Supérieure and member of the École française de Rome, he was honorary professor at the Collège de France.
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