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,
#351
Clive Ponting
#7283
Overall Influence
1946 - 2020 (74 years)
Clive Sheridan Ponting was a senior British civil servant and historian. In 1984, he leaked classified documents about the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano in the Falklands War in 1982, which showed that government statements about the sinking were untrue. He was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, but argued that his actions were in the public interest, and was acquitted. At the time of his resignation from the civil service in 1985, he was a Grade 5 , earning £23,000 per year .
Go to Profile#352
Martin van Creveld
#6250
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Martin Levi van Creveld is an Israeli military historian and theorist. Life and career Van Creveld was born in the Netherlands in the city of Rotterdam to a Jewish family. His parents, Leon and Margaret, were staunch Zionists who had managed to evade the gestapo during World War II.
Go to Profile#353
Fritz Stern
#7555
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Fritz Richard Stern was a German-born American historian of German history, Jewish history and historiography. He was a University Professor and a provost at New York's Columbia University. His work focused on the complex relationships between Germans and Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries and on the rise of National Socialism in Germany during the first half of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#354
Steven Mintz
#20473
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Steven Mintz , is an American historian at the University of Texas at Austin. For five years, from 2012 through 2017, he served as executive director of the University of Texas System's Institute for Transformational Learning. This institute is tasked with delivering a high-quality education that is more affordable and accessible across the System's 14 academic campuses and health science centers. He previously taught history at Oberlin College, University of Houston, and Columbia University, where he directed the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Center. He has also held visit...
Go to Profile#355
Sverker Sörlin
#14471
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Sverker Sörlin is a Swedish historian of ideas, professor in environmental history, and writer. Biography Sörlin has a PhD in the history of ideas from Umeå University from 1988. In 1993, he assumed the first chair in environmental history in Scandinavia, also at Umeå University. Since 2007, he is professor of environmental history at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He's had an adjunct position at the Stockholm Resilience Centre , and visiting positions at University of California Berkeley , University of Ca...
Go to Profile#356
James C. Klotter
#4433
Overall Influence
James C. Klotter is an American historian who has served as the State Historian of Kentucky since 1980. Klotter is also a history professor at Georgetown College and one of the co-authors of Kentucky's staple history book, A New History of Kentucky.
Go to Profile#357
Rachel Fulton Brown
#21013
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Rachel Fulton Brown is an American medievalist. She is an Associate Professor of Medieval History, Fundamentals, and the College at the University of Chicago. Fulton Brown has authored a variety of texts on the topic of Christian studies and the Middle Ages, and a 2019 book chronicling her friendship with far-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos through Yiannopoulos's publishing imprint, Dangerous Books. Fulton Brown has also written for Breitbart. In December 2020, United States president Donald Trump announced an intent to appoint Fulton Brown to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, which th...
Go to Profile#358
Francesco Boldizzoni
#18484
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Francesco Boldizzoni is an Italian academic and historian. He is currently a professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, having previously taught at the University of Turin and the University of Helsinki, and held research positions at Clare Hall, Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne.
Go to Profile#359
Yosef Ben-Jochannan
#14978
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Yosef Alfredo Antonio Ben-Jochannan , referred to as "Dr. Ben", was an American writer and historian. He was considered to be one of the more prominent Afrocentric scholars by some Black Nationalists, while most mainstream scholars, such as Mary Lefkowitz, dismissed him because of the basic historical inaccuracies in his work, as well as disputes about the authenticity of his educational degrees and academic credentials.
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P. J. Marshall
#10237
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Peter James Marshall is a British historian known for his work on the British Empire, particularly the activities of British East India Company servants in 18th-century Bengal, and also the history of British involvement in North America during the same period. He is not to be confused with his contemporary, the other P. J. Marshall, who chronicled the history of public transport in the British Isles.
Go to Profile#361
Jeremy Black
#8376
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jeremy Black is a British historian, writer, and former professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US.
Go to Profile#362
John Tosh
#22957
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#363
Paul Horgan
#14151
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Paul George Vincent O'Shaughnessy Horgan was an American writer of historical fiction and non-fiction who mainly wrote about the Southwestern United States. He was the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes for History.
Go to Profile#364
Alfred W. McCoy
#3600
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Alfred "Al" William McCoy is an American historian and educator. He is the Fred Harvey Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He specializes in the history of the Philippines, foreign policy of the United States, European colonisation of Southeast Asia, illegal drug trade, and Central Intelligence Agency covert operations.
Go to Profile#365
Bartel Leendert van der Waerden
#616
Overall Influence
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
Bartel Leendert van der Waerden was a Dutch mathematician and historian of mathematics. Biography Education and early career Van der Waerden learned advanced mathematics at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Göttingen, from 1919 until 1926. He was much influenced by Emmy Noether at Göttingen, Germany. Amsterdam awarded him a Ph.D. for a thesis on algebraic geometry, supervised by Hendrick de Vries. Göttingen awarded him the habilitation in 1928. In that year, at the age of 25, he accepted a professorship at the University of Groningen.
Go to Profile#366
Edward L. Ayers
#16002
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Edward Lynn "Ed" Ayers is an American historian, professor, administrator, and university president. In July 2013, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony for Ayers's commitment "to making our history as widely available and accessible as possible." He served as the president of the Organization of American Historians in 2017–18.
Go to Profile#367
Geoff Eley
#18356
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Geoffrey Howard [Geoff] Eley is a British-born historian of Germany. He studied history at Balliol College, Oxford, and received his PhD from the University of Sussex in 1974. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the Department of History since 1979 and the Department of German Studies since 1997. He now serves as the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at Michigan.
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Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
#9660
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian specializing in early America and the history of women, and a professor at Harvard University. Her approach to history has been described as a tribute to "the silent work of ordinary people". Ulrich has also been a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient. Her most famous book, A Midwife’s Tale, was later the basis for a PBS documentary film.
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David Blackbourn
#27757
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
David Gordon Blackbourn is Cornelius Vanderbilt distinguished chair of history at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches modern German and European history. Prior to arriving at Vanderbilt, Blackbourn was Coolidge Professor of history at Harvard University.
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Ronald Numbers
#3931
Overall Influence
1942 - 2023 (81 years)
Ronald Leslie Numbers was an American historian of science. He was awarded the 2008 George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society for "a lifetime of exceptional scholarly achievement by a distinguished scholar".
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Kevin Starr
#5265
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Kevin Owen Starr was an American historian and California's state librarian, best known for his multi-volume series on the history of California, collectively called "Americans and the California Dream."
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Michael Vickery
#3573
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Michael Theodore Vickery was an American historian, lecturer, and author known for his works about the history of Southeast Asia. Life Vickery was born on April 1, 1931, in Billings, Montana. After acquiring a Bachelor of Arts in Russian studies from the University of Washington in 1952, Vickery became a Fulbright scholar in Finland from 1953 to 1955 before joining the United States Army in Germany from 1956 to 1958. He then taught English in Istanbul, Turkey, from 1958 to 1960, in Cambodia from 1960 to 1964, and in Laos from 1964 to 1967.
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Patrick K. O'Brien
#21285
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Patrick Karl O'Brien is a British historian who serves as professor emeritus of global economic history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He received a DPhil from Nuffield College in 1960 for a thesis entitled Government Revenue, 1793–1815: A Study of Fiscal and Financial Policy in the Wars Against France .
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Frank Dikötter
#8408
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Frank Dikötter is a Dutch historian who specialises in modern China. Dikötter has been Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006. Prior to that, he taught modern Chinese history at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He holds an honorary doctorate from Leiden University and is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
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Wolfgang Mommsen
#15490
Overall Influence
1930 - 2004 (74 years)
Wolfgang Justin Mommsen was a German historian. He was the twin brother of historian Hans Mommsen and the great-grandson of Theodor Mommsen. Biography Wolfgang Mommsen was born in Marburg, the son of the historian Wilhelm Mommsen and great-grandson of the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen. He was educated at the University of Marburg, the University of Cologne, and the University of Leeds between 1951 and 1959. He was assistant professor at the University of Cologne and full professor University of Düsseldorf ; he directed the German Historical Institute in London between 1978 and 1985. In 196...
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Ronald Takaki
#16166
Overall Influence
1939 - 2009 (70 years)
Ronald Toshiyuki Takaki was an American academic, historian, ethnographer and author. Born in pre-statehood Hawaii, Takaki studied at the College of Wooster and completed his doctorate in American history at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Leonid Grinin
#10633
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Leonid Efimovich Grinin is a Russian philosopher of history, sociologist, political anthropologist, economist, and futurologist. Born in Kamyshin , Grinin attended Volgograd State Pedagogical University, where he got an M.A. in 1980. He got his Ph.D. from Moscow State University in 1996.
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Geoffrey Parker
#14748
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Noel Geoffrey Parker is an English historian specialising in the history of Western Europe, Spain, and warfare during the early modern era. His best known book is The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1988.
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Bartolomé Bennassar
#17673
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Bartolomé Bennassar was a French historian and writer. He specialized in Spanish and Latin American history. Career Bennassar began as a history professor in 1952, and defended his thesis in 1957. He was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, specializing in contemporary history of Spain and Latin America, as well as the 16th and 17th centuries. He was also a renowned critic of bullfighting.
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Leon Litwack
#8678
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Leon Frank Litwack was an American historian whose scholarship focused on slavery, the Reconstruction Era of the United States, and its aftermath into the 20th century. He won a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for History, and the Francis Parkman Prize for his 1979 book Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Catherine Hall
#5170
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Catherine Hall is a British academic. She is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London and chair of its digital scholarship project, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. Her work as a feminist historian focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, and the themes of gender, class, race and empire.
Go to Profile#382
Dipesh Chakrabarty
#6462
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Dipesh Chakrabarty is an Indian historian and leading scholar of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies. He is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in history at the University of Chicago, and is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, named after Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, that recognizes social scientists for significant academic and public contributions to humanity.
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Philipp Ther
#12085
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Philipp Ther is an Austrian and German historian. He is a tenured university professor at the University of Vienna who received the Wittgenstein Award in 2019. Ther is the founding director of the Research Center for the History of Transformations .
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Stuart B. Schwartz
#11066
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Stuart B. Schwartz is the George Burton Adams Professor of History at Yale University, the Chair of the Council of Latin American and Iberian Studies, and the former Master of Ezra Stiles College. Education Schwartz was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. As an undergraduate he studied at Middlebury College and the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Middlebury, he went on to study Latin American history at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1968.
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Christopher Lasch
#4159
Overall Influence
1932 - 1994 (62 years)
Robert Christopher Lasch was an American historian, moralist and social critic who was a history professor at the University of Rochester. He sought to use history to demonstrate what he saw as the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities. Lasch strove to create a historically informed social criticism that could teach Americans how to deal with rampant consumerism, proletarianization, and what he famously labeled "the culture of narcissism".
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Michael Oren
#2886
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Michael Bornstein Oren is an American-Israeli diplomat, essayist, historian, novelist, and politician. He is a former Israeli ambassador to the United States , former member of the Knesset for the Kulanu party and a former Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister's Office.
Go to Profile#387
Alun Howkins
#23243
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
Alun Howkins was an English social historian, specialising in the history of English rural society. Regarded as a leading historian of the English countryside and its working class, Howkins was a professor of history at the University of Sussex and co-founder of the journal Rural History.
Go to Profile#388
George C. Rable
#9450
Overall Influence
George C. Rable is an American historian and author. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alabama. He received the Lincoln Prize in 2003 for his 2002 book Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Education He received a bachelor of arts degree from Bluffton College in 1972 and a Master of Arts degree from Louisiana State University in 1973. He received his doctoral degree from Louisiana State University in 1978.
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Akira Fujiwara
#12827
Overall Influence
1922 - 2003 (81 years)
was a Japanese historian. His academic speciality was modern Japanese history and he was a professor emeritus at Hitotsubashi University. In 1980 he became a member of the Science Council of Japan and was a former chairman of the Historical Science Society of Japan.
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Pierre Rosanvallon
#8676
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Pierre Rosanvallon is a French historian and sociologist. He was named a professor at the Collège de France in 2001, holding the chair in modern and contemporary political history. His works are dedicated to the history of democracy, French political history, the role of the state and the question of social justice in contemporary societies.
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Robert Roswell Palmer
#14171
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
Robert Roswell Palmer was an American historian at Princeton and Yale universities, who specialized in eighteenth-century France. His most influential work of scholarship, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 , examined the Atlantic Revolutions, an age of democratic revolution that swept Europe and the Americas between 1760 and 1800. He was awarded the Bancroft Prize in History for the first volume. Palmer also achieved distinction as a history text writer.
Go to Profile#392
Francesca Trivellato
#19740
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Francesca Trivellato is an Italian historian, focusing on cultural, economic and social history in the early modern period. Her publications have covered Italian history, Jewish history and trade and cultural networks. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Go to Profile#393
Jon Halliday
#8719
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Jon Halliday is an Irish historian specialising in modern Asia. He was formerly a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London. He was educated at University of Oxford and has been married to Jung Chang since 1991. Halliday is the older brother of the late Irish International relations academic and writer Fred Halliday.
Go to Profile#394
C. Northcote Parkinson
#5308
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Cyril Northcote Parkinson was a British naval historian and author of some 60 books, the most famous of which was his best-seller Parkinson's Law , in which Parkinson advanced the eponymous law stating that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", an insight which led him to be regarded as an important scholar in public administration and management.
Go to Profile#395
Francis Sejersted
#21196
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Francis Sejersted was a Norwegian history professor and the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee from 1991 until 1995. Early life Sejersted was born in Oslo. He performed his military service at the prestigious Russian language program of the Norwegian Armed Forces. He was later educated in history as well as Nordic linguistics and literature at the University of Oslo and achieved a cand.philol. degree in 1965 and a doctorate in 1973. In 1962 Francis Sejersted was president of the Norwegian Students' Association representing the student wing of the Conservative Party of Norway, a party ...
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Timothy W. Ryback
#16174
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Timothy W. Ryback is a historian and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. He previously served as the Deputy-Secretary General of the Académie Diplomatique Internationale in Paris, and Director and Vice President of the Salzburg Global Seminar. Prior to this, he was a lecturer in the Concentration of History and Literature at Harvard University. Ryback has a doctorate.
Go to Profile#397
Geir Lundestad
#9135
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Geir Lundestad was a Norwegian historian, who until 2014 served as the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute when Olav Njølstad took over. In this capacity, he also served as the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. However, he was not a member of the committee itself.
Go to Profile#398
Joachim Radkau
#12817
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Joachim Radkau is a German historian. Life Radkau was born in Oberlübbe, now Hille, Landkreis Minden. Son of a Protestant priest, he studied history in Münster, Berlin and Hamburg from 1963 to 1968. He was influenced e.g. by Fritz Fischer. His doctorate, which he earned in 1970, treated the role of German immigrants 1933-45 on Franklin D. Roosevelt. From 1971 on he started to teach at Bielefeld University.
Go to Profile#399
Jean-Pierre Vernant
#3337
Overall Influence
1914 - 2007 (93 years)
Jean-Pierre Vernant was a French historian and anthropologist, specialist in ancient Greece. Influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Vernant developed a structuralist approach to Greek myth, tragedy, and society which would itself be influential among classical scholars. He was an honorary professor at the Collège de France.
Go to Profile#400
Eino Jutikkala
#19546
Overall Influence
1907 - 2006 (99 years)
Eino Kaarlo Ilmari Jutikkala , until 1931 Rinne, was a Finnish historian, and professor of history at the University of Helsinki from 1950 to 1974. He had an exceptionally long and prolific career, and is considered one of the most important Finnish historians of the 20th century.
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