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).

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List of the most influential people in History,

#2051

Rachel Laudan

#48314
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Rachel Laudan is a food historian, author of the prizewinning Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. Early life Laudan grew up on a traditional family farm in South West England. Her father was Cambridge-educated and his opinion of farming as “the highest calling” could well have been carried by his daughter as she moved through life. Laudan's mother was the traditional image of a farmer's wife and cooked three meals a day for the family and the farm workers, every day of the year. This idyllic picture was noted by Laudan in an interview with The Austin Chronicle in 2013 where she comments “It created drudgery for my mother”.
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#2052

E. Gordon Gee

E. Gordon Gee
#22804
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Elwood Gordon Gee is an American academic administrator. As of 2023, he was serving his second term as President of West Virginia University; his first term was from 1981 to 1985. Gee has held more university presidencies than any other American. He was head of University of Colorado Boulder from 1985 to 1990, of Ohio State University from 1990 to 1997, of Brown University from 1998 to 2000, of Vanderbilt University from 2000 to 2007, and of Ohio State University for a second time from 2007 to 2013.
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#2053

Claudio Saunt

#51617
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Claudio Saunt is a professor, author, and historian of early America, the U.S. South, and Native American studies. Saunt is the prize-winning author of Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory , West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 , Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family , A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 . Saunt received his Ph.D. in Early America from Duke University in 1996 and presently works as a Richard B. Russell Professor in American History at the University of Georgia, Athens.
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#2054

Charles P. Melville

#83004
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Charles P. Melville is a British academic who has been Professor of Persian History at the University of Cambridge since 2008. He is the President of the British Institute of Persian Studies. He was one of the editors of The Cambridge History of Iran and History of Literature of Iran. He was educated in childhood at Wellington College before reading Arabic and Persian at Pembroke College, Cambridge; he went on to complete an M.A. in Islamic history at SOAS and a Ph.D. on historical seismicity in Iran.
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#2055

Page Smith

#49596
Overall Influence
1917 - 1995 (78 years)
Page Smith was an American historian, professor and author. In 1964 he became the founding Provost of Cowell College, University of California, Santa Cruz and resigned from the university in 1973 in protest. As an activist, he was a lifelong advocate for homeless people, for community organization, and for improving the prison system.
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#2056

Mati Laur

Mati Laur
#73794
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Mati Laur is an Estonian historian. He has written and co-authored textbooks about early modern Estonia. He has published scholarly articles about eighteenth-century Estonia, which also was the subject of his Ph.D. thesis. Despite this narrow specialisation, he is professor of general history at the University of Tartu.
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#2057

Brent Shaw

Brent Shaw
#49131
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Brent Donald Shaw is a Canadian historian and the current Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics at Princeton University. His principal contributions center on the regional history of the Roman world with special emphasis on the African provinces of the Roman Empire, the demographic and social history of the Roman family, and problems of violence and social order.
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#2058

Marek Żukow-Karczewski

#45248
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Marek Żukow-Karczewski is a Polish historian, journalist, and author who specializes in the history of Poland, especially Kraków, and in the history of architecture and environmental issues. He is a descendant of the Polish noble family Karczewski and of the Russian noble family Żukow .
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#2059

Martin Glaberman

#32199
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
Martin Glaberman was an American Marxist writer on labor, historian, academic, and autoworker. Biography Glaberman was associated with the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a radical left group which understood the Soviet Union as a state capitalist society that split from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which understood the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state.
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#2060

M. Norton Wise

M. Norton Wise
#52510
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Matthew Norton Wise is an American historian of science who is an emeritus professor at the University of California, Los Angeles . He was also the co-director of the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics. He famously attacked Gross and Levitt's book in which they perceive the obstruction of science by the academic left.
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#2061

Alice Slotsky

#41546
Overall Influence
Alice Louise Slotsky was an American historian of mathematics and Assyriologist known for her studies of Babylonian mathematics and Babylonian accounting and for her popular courses at Brown University on the Akkadian language.
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#2062

Michael Roberts

#45235
Overall Influence
1908 - 1997 (89 years)
Michael Roberts was an English historian specializing in the early modern period. He was particularly known for his studies of Swedish history, and his introduction of the concept of a Military Revolution in early modern Europe.
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#2063

Karl Heinz Göller

#74782
Overall Influence
1924 - 2009 (85 years)
Karl Heinz Göller was a noted German medievalist and founder of the Mediävistenverband, the German association for medieval studies. Biography Karl Heinz Göller was born in Neheim-Hüsten near Dortmund, Germany, in 1924. He served from 1942 as a signalman in the airforce and was a prisoner of war until 1945. After the war he studied English in Bonn, submitting a doctorate on the 18th-century poet James Thomson in 1955, and a Habilitation on English Arthurian literature in 1962. He taught at the Universities of Bonn and Göttingen before assuming the chair of British Literature at the University of Regensburg in 1967, a position he held until his retirement in 1992.
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#2064

Mari Jo Buhle

#26654
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Mari Jo Buhle is an American historian and William J. Kenan Jr. University Professor Emerita at Brown University. Early life and education Buhle was born in 1943 as Mari Jo Kupski. She graduated from North Chicago Community High School in 1961.
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#2065

Elizabeth Isichei

#44828
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Elizabeth Mary Isichei is a New Zealand author, historian and academic. Early life, family and education Isichei was born Elizabeth Mary Allo in Tauranga, New Zealand, on 22 March 1939, the daughter of Albert and Lorna Allo. She was educated at Tauranga College, and attained the highest marks in New Zealand in the 1955 university entrance scholarship examinations. She went on to study at the University of Canterbury, from where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1960 and won a senior university scholarship. She then completed a Master of Arts with first-class honours in history at Victoria University of Wellington in 1961.
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#2066

David Dilks

#38796
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
David N. Dilks, FRHistS, FRSL is a British historian and former professor of International History at the University of Leeds. Early life and education Dilks was born in Foleshill, a suburb of Coventry, and attended The Royal Grammar School Worcester before winning a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford, to read history.
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#2067

Waldemar Rezmer

#64041
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Waldemar Rezmer is a Polish historian. A professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, he specializes in the modern military history, particularly Polish, Lithuanian and Soviet. External links
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#2068

George B. Dertilis

#63509
Overall Influence
1939 - 2023 (84 years)
George B. Dertilis was a Greek historian and academic. He was known for his expertise and contributions to the economic history of Greece and Europe, as well as his extensive research on the history of political thought and institutions.
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#2069

Tracy Borman

#59431
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Tracy Joanne Borman is a historian and author from Scothern, Lincolnshire, England. She is most widely known as the author of Elizabeth's Women, a portrait-gallery of the powerful women who influenced Queen Elizabeth I.
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#2070

Pak Noja

#37277
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Vladimir Tikhonov , known mainly by his Korean art name Pak Noja , is a Soviet-born Korean activist, historian, Koreanist, and writer. Biography Pak was born as Vladimir Tikhonov to Russian Jewish family in Leningrad, Soviet Union. His Russian name is Vladimir Tikhonov, but after immigrating to South Korea in 1997, he changed his name into a Korean name, Pak Noja and became naturalized as a South Korean citizen in 2001.
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#2071

Emory M. Thomas

#41419
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Emory Thomas is a history professor emeritus at the University of Georgia and noted scholar of the American Civil War. He earned a Ph.D. from Rice University in 1966. Selected works The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital The American War and Peace, 1860-1877 The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865 Bold Dragoon: The Life of J.E.B. Stuart Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian's Journey to the American Civil War Robert E. Lee: A Biography Robert E. Lee: An Album
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#2072

John Molony

#79619
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
John Neylon Molony was an Australian historian, academic and author. He was an Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University . Molony's long academic career with the ANU began in 1964, when he was employed as a research assistant in medieval history in the school of social science. He was to go on to become head of the department of history and to hold the Manning Clark Chair of Australian History from 1982 until his retirement from the university in 1990. On his retirement, the ANU appointed Molony as an emeritus professor of history.
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#2073

Marie Theres Fögen

Marie Theres Fögen
#85253
Overall Influence
1946 - 2008 (62 years)
Marie Theres Fögen was a German jurist and historian. She taught law at the University of Zurich and Harvard University and was director of the Max Planck Institute for European History of Law in Frankfurt am Main.
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#2074

Charles B. Dew

#37122
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Charles Burgess Dew is an American author and historian, specializing in the history of the Southern United States, American Civil War and the Reconstruction era, and holds the Ephraim Williams Professorship of American History at Williams College. His first of three published books was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
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#2075

Christopher Tyerman

#47277
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Christopher Tyerman is an academic historian focusing on the Crusades. In 2015, he was appointed Professor of History of the Crusades at the University of Oxford. Life and career He graduated from New College, Oxford, with a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974; he lectured at the University of York between 1976 and 1977, before returning to Oxford as a research fellow at Queen's College ; in 1981, he completed his doctor of philosophy degree and won the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize Medal. He also took up another research fellowship at Exeter College which lasted from 1982 to 1987.
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#2076

Stephan R. Epstein

#77257
Overall Influence
1960 - 2007 (47 years)
Stephan R. Epstein , known as "Larry", was a British economic historian, and a professor at the London School of Economics. Brought up in Switzerland, he studied at the University of Siena, and later received a PhD from the University of Cambridge. In 1992 he was made a lecturer in economic history at the LSE, by 1997 he had been appointed reader, and in 2001 professor.
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#2077

Mario Rosa

#54701
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Mario Rosa was an Italian historian. Life and career Rosa was born on 8 May 1932. He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Rosa had taught early modern history at the Universities of Lecce, Bari, Pisa, La Sapienza of Rome and finally at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, where he served also as deputy-director and where he was actually emeritus.
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#2078

George Jewsbury

#45454
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
George F. Jewsbury is an American historian who has collaborated on several textbooks in the Civilization: Past & Present series. He joined authors T. Walter Wallbank, Alastair M. Taylor, and Nels M. Bailkey, beginning with the single volume fifth edition. Jewsbury has also written several books on history, including Russian Annexation of Bessarabia, 1774–1828. He was a professor of history at Oklahoma State University, and is a specialist on Russia and the USSR.
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#2079

Kate Brown

#47996
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Kate Brown is a Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future , Dispatches from Dystopia , Plutopia , and A Biography of No Place . She was a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County from 2000 to 2018. She is the founding consulting editor of History Unclassified in the American Historical Review.
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#2080

Elliott Oring

#33700
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Elliott Oring is an American author of academic books primarily relating to the topics of folklore, humor, and cultural symbolism. Oring is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at California State University, Los Angeles, and serves on the Editorial Board of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research. In 2010-2011 he was President of the International Society for Humor Studies.
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#2081

Paul K. Longmore

#55669
Overall Influence
1946 - 2010 (64 years)
Paul K. Longmore was a professor of history, an author, and a notable disability activist who taught at San Francisco State University. Life Paul Longmore lost the use of his hands to polio when he was seven-years-old and required breathing assistance from a ventilator at night and for part of the day. He received both his bachelor's and master's degrees from Occidental College, graduating in 1968 and 1971, respectively, and majoring in history and minoring in political studies. In 1984, he received his doctorate from Claremont Graduate University, where he majored in history and minored in early American history, U.S.
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#2082

David Sorkin

#37173
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
David Sorkin is the Lucy G. Moses professor of Jewish history at Yale University. Sorkin specializes in the intersection of Jewish and European history, and has published several prominent books including Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries.
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#2083

Alexander Kazhdan

Alexander Kazhdan
#19399
Overall Influence
1922 - 1997 (75 years)
Alexander Petrovich Kazhdan was a Soviet-American Byzantinist. Among his publications was the three-volume Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, a comprehensive encyclopedic work containing over than 5,000 entries.
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#2084

Raymond T. McNally

#63661
Overall Influence
1931 - 2002 (71 years)
Raymond T McNally was an American author and a professor of Russian and East European History at Boston College. He specialized in the history of horror and wrote many books on the subject. He co-authored several books with Radu Florescu , who was also a professor at Boston College.
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#2085

Lewis Siegelbaum

#42242
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Lewis H. Siegelbaum is Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History at Michigan State University . His interests include 20th century Europe, Russia and Soviet Union. He has been with MSU since 1983.
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#2086

Susan Whitfield

#31919
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Susan Whitfield is a British scholar, currently Professor in Silk Road Studies at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures , University of East Anglia. She previously worked at the British Library in London, England. She specialises in the history and archaeology of the Silk Road but has also written on human rights and censorship in China.
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#2087

Erich Angermann

#76573
Overall Influence
1927 - 1992 (65 years)
Erich Angermann was a German historian for North American history at the University of Cologne. Life Angermann was born in 1927 as the son of an elementary school teacher in Chemnitz. He attended the humanistic . From 1947 he studied history, German and English language and literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. In 1952 he received his doctorate under Franz Schnabel on the subject Karl Mathy als Sozial- und Wirtschaftspolitiker 1842–48 . From 1952 Angermann was scientific assistant of the and at the Amerika-Institut . In 1961 followed the Habilitation with Franz Schnabel with a thesis on the liberal political scientist and politician Robert von Mohl.
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#2088

Kate Williams

Kate Williams
#46018
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Kate Williams is a British historian, author, and television presenter. She is a professor of public engagement with history at the University of Reading. Early life and education Williams grew up in Stourbridge. Her father Gwyn was a solicitor and her mother Margaret was a teacher. Her paternal grandparents were from the Conwy Valley. She was educated at Edgbaston High School for Girls, Birmingham. She studied for her BA and DPhil at Somerville College, Oxford, where she started as a College Scholar and received the Violet Vaughan Morgan University Scholarship. She has MAs from Queen Mary, University of London and Royal Holloway, University of London.
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#2089

Jenny Wormald

#36071
Overall Influence
1942 - 2015 (73 years)
Jennifer "Jenny" Wormald HonFSA Scot was a Scottish historian who studied late medieval and early modern Scotland. Life Jennifer was born in Glasgow on 18 January 1942, and was adopted by Margaret and Dr Thomas Tannahill, a general practitioner, and was then known as Jenny Tannahill.
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#2090

Quinn Slobodian

Quinn Slobodian
#28811
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Quinn Slobodian is a Canadian historian of modern Germany and international history who has been Marion Butler McLean Professor of the History of Ideas at Wellesley College since 2022. Beginning in January 2024, he will be Professor of History at Boston University. During 2017-2018 academic year, he was a Residential Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University in 2017–8.
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#2091

Jaromír Tauchen

#63660
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Jaromír Tauchen is a Czech lawyer, law-historian, certified judiciary interpreter and translator and lecturer at the Faculty of Law, Masaryk University, Brno. His researches are mainly aimed at German legal history, especially the era of the Third Reich in Germany, in the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia and history of Germans in the Czech lands.
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#2092

J. M. S. Careless

#47489
Overall Influence
1919 - 2009 (90 years)
James Maurice Stockford Careless was a Canadian historian. Biography J.M.S. Careless was born in Toronto, Ontario and attended the University of Toronto Schools. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1940 from Trinity College at the University of Toronto. He attended Harvard University and received a Master's degree in 1941 and a PhD in 1950.
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#2093

Hank Nelson

#30923
Overall Influence
1937 - 2012 (75 years)
Hyland Neil "Hank" Nelson was one of Australia's foremost historians of the Pacific, particularly Papua New Guinea. His interest in the region began in 1966 when he took a teaching position at the Administrative College of Papua New Guinea and later the University. He lived in Papua New Guinea for seven years and studied the period of Japanese occupation, which led to several publications.
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#2094

David E. Nye

#73962
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
David E. Nye is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the winner of the 2005 Leonardo da Vinci Medal of the Society for the History of Technology. Books The Invented Self: An Anti-biography, from Documents of Thomas A. Edison †Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890-1930 Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940 American Technological Sublime Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture **Technologies of Landscape: Fr...
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#2095

Theodore K. Rabb

#62311
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Theodore K. Rabb was an American historian specializing in the early modern period of European history. He was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Princeton University. He was one of the leading scholars in the field of 16th- and 17th-century Europe, focusing on varying topics such as climate history and food history.
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#2096

Josephine Crawley Quinn

#71030
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Josephine Crawley Quinn is a historian and archaeologist, working across Greek, Roman and Phoenician history. Quinn is a Professor of Ancient History in the Faculty of Classics and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Worcester College, University of Oxford.
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#2097

Peter Herde

#48387
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Peter Herde is a German historian. His research activities range from fundamental work on papal diplomatics of the Middle Ages to the history of the country up to the Second World War. Life Herd was born in 1933 in Racibórz, Upper Silesia. He was the son of deputy headmaster Reinhard Herde and Hildegard Herde. He spent his childhood and the first years of his youth in Ratibor. Since autumn 1943 he attended the Realgymnasium Ratibor. The family fled from the Red Army at the end of January 1945 and found their new home in Arnsberg. In Neheim-Hüsten he passed his Abitur in 1953. In the summer semester of 1953 he began studying physics and mathematics at the University of Heidelberg.
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#2098

Leo P. Ribuffo

#37719
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Leo Paul Ribuffo was an American historian. He was Society of the Cincinnati George Washington Distinguished Professor at George Washington University. Life Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1945, Ribuffo graduated from Rutgers University in 1966 with a B.A. in history and earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1976.
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#2099

Gabriela Signori

#91157
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Gabriela Signori is a Swiss historian of the Middle Ages. She served as a professor of medieval history at the University of Münster from 2001–2006, and is a professor at the University of Konstanz from 2006 to the present. Her main area of research in medieval studies is the social history of the era: medieval law, gender mores, piety, and religious beliefs.
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#2100

Paul Avrich

Paul Avrich
#40132
Overall Influence
1931 - 2006 (75 years)
Paul Avrich was an American historian specialising in the 19th and early 20th century anarchist movement in Russia and the United States. He taught at Queens College, City University of New York, for his entire career, from 1961 to his retirement as distinguished professor of history in 1999. He wrote ten books, mostly about anarchism, including topics such as the 1886 Haymarket Riot, 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti case, 1921 Kronstadt naval base rebellion, and an oral history of the movement.
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