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,
#451
Toyin Falola
#7697
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Toyin Omoyeni Falola is a Nigerian historian and professor of African Studies. Falola is a Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria and of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, and has served as the president of the African Studies Association. He is currently the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#452
Jean Rudolf von Salis
#16625
Overall Influence
1901 - 1996 (95 years)
Jean Rudolf von Salis was a Swiss historian who gained prominence with his weekly "Weltchronik" radio broadcasts from 1940 until 1947. As von Salis never wrote English publications and his works were rarely translated, he is little known outside of the European historical sciences.
Go to Profile#453
Peter Davies
#15638
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Peter N. Davies was a British economic historian with interests in the port of Liverpool, sea-based trade with West Africa, the Canary Islands and Japan, the international fruit trade and the military history of the River Kwai campaign in World War II. He was an Emeritus Professor in the School of History at the University of Liverpool, England.
Go to Profile#454
István Deák
#17203
Overall Influence
1926 - 2023 (97 years)
István Deák was a Hungarian-born American historian, author and academic. He was a specialist in modern Europe, with special attention to Germany and Hungary. Life and work Deák was born at Székesfehérvár, Hungary into an assimilated Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism. His parents were Istvan and Anna Deák. He was educated at a Catholic gymnasium in Budapest and began his university studies in 1945 at the University of Budapest. His studies were disrupted by the war and postwar chaos, and he left Hungary in 1948, following the communist takeover. He then studied history at the Sorbonne in Paris and worked as a journalist in France and for Radio Free Europe in West Germany.
Go to Profile#455
Gabriel Salazar
#7131
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Gabriel Salazar Vergara is a Chilean historian. He is known in his country for his study of social history and interpretations of social movements, particularly the recent student protests of 2006 and 2011–12.
Go to Profile#456
Sheldon Hackney
#20124
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Francis Sheldon Hackney was an American educator, historian, and chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was president of Tulane University from 1975 to 1980 and president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1981 to 1993.
Go to Profile#457
Jean Tulard
#9913
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Jean Tulard is a French academic and historian. Considered one of the best specialists of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Napoleonic era , he is nicknamed by his peers "the master of Napoleonic studies".
Go to Profile#458
Josefina Zoraida Vázquez
#18063
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Josefina Zoraida Vázquez is a noted Mexican historian, considered the Mexican expert on the Mexican–American War. Early life Vázquez is the daughter of Modesto Vázquez. She was raised in Mexico City, where she attended public schools. Her education was conducted entirely in Spanish; she did not study either English or French in school, as her counterparts in private schools did. As a teenager, she worked part-time for her father, clerking in his bookstore and correcting gallery proofs for books he was editing. After graduating from high school, Vázquez entered the National Autonomous University of Mexico , studying philosophy and letters.
Go to Profile#459
Peter McLaughlin
#15417
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Peter McLaughlin is an Irish academic, historian, and educator. He is the CEO of Max Learning Limited, the educational arm of the Max Group. He was Headmaster of The Doon School. Before joining Doon in 2009, he served as Headmaster of Douai School, and Principal of the British International School in Cairo and of Casterton School in England. McLaughlin retired from Doon in May 2016.
Go to Profile#460
Michael Cook
#8866
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Michael Allan Cook FBA is a British historian and scholar of Islamic history. Cook is the general editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam. Biography Michael Cook developed an early interest in Turkey and Ottoman history and studied history and oriental studies at King's College, Cambridge 1959-1963 and did postgraduate studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London 1963–1966. He was lecturer in Economic History with reference to the Middle East at SOAS 1966-1984 and reader in the History of the Near and Middle East 1984–1986. In 1986, he was appointed Cleveland E.
Go to Profile#461
Joe Medicine Crow
#10279
Overall Influence
1913 - 2016 (103 years)
Joseph Medicine Crow was a Native American writer, historian and war chief of the Crow Nation. His writings on Native American history and reservation culture are considered seminal works, but he is best known for his writings and lectures concerning the Battle of the Little Bighorn of 1876.
Go to Profile#462
Patrick Boucheron
#22173
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Patrick Boucheron is a French historian. He previously taught medieval history at the École normale supérieure and the University of Paris. He is a professor of history at the Collège de France. He is the author of 12 books and or the editor of 5 books. His 2017 book, Histoire mondiale de la France , compiled work by 122 historians and became an unexpected bestseller, with more than 110 000 copies sold. From 2017 to 2020, he hosted Quand l'histoire fait dates, a TV program of 22 episodes which explored different important dates in world history.
Go to Profile#463
Alfred D. Chandler Jr.
#5628
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr. was a professor of business history at Harvard Business School and Johns Hopkins University, who wrote extensively about the scale and the management structures of modern corporations. His works redefined business and economic history of industrialization. He received the Pulitzer Prize for History for his work, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business . He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has been called "the doyen of American business historians".
Go to Profile#464
Maxime Rodinson
#6067
Overall Influence
1915 - 2004 (89 years)
Maxime Rodinson was a French historian and sociologist. Ideologically a Marxist, Rodinson was a prominent authority oriental studies. He was the son of a Russian-Polish clothing trader and his wife, who both were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. After studying oriental languages, he became a professor of Ge'ez at the École pratique des hautes études. He was the author of a body of work, including the book Muhammad, a biography of the prophet of Islam.
Go to Profile#465
Thomas Nipperdey
#11407
Overall Influence
1927 - 1992 (65 years)
Thomas Nipperdey was a German historian best known for his monumental and exhaustive studies of Germany from 1800 to 1918. As a critical follower of Leopold von Ranke's famous ideal of writing "history exactly as it happened," Nipperdey sought to explain the interconnectedness of political, social and cultural developments, while avoiding partisanship and rejecting moralistic efforts to see German history before 1933 only in the light of Nazism.
Go to Profile#466
Boris Akunin
#5027
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigori Chkhartishvili , a Russian-Georgian writer. He is best known as writer of detective and historical fiction. He is also an essayist and literary translator. Grigory Chkhartishvili has also written under pen names Anatoly Brusnikin, Anna Borisova, and Akunin-Chkhartishvili. His characters include Erast Fandorin, Nicholas Fandorin and Sister Pelagia.
Go to Profile#467
Leonard J. Arrington
#14463
Overall Influence
1917 - 1999 (82 years)
Leonard James Arrington was an American author, academic and the founder of the Mormon History Association. He is known as the "Dean of Mormon History" and "the Father of Mormon History" because of his many influential contributions to the field. Since 1842, he was the first non-general authority Church Historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , from 1972 to 1982, and was director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History from 1982 until 1986.
Go to Profile#468
Paul Ginsborg
#16502
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Paul Anthony Ginsborg was a British historian. In the 1980s, he was Professor at the University of Siena; from 1992, he was Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Florence. Education and activism Ginsborg was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA degree in History in 1966. He was a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. With Pancho Pardi, he opposed Silvio Berlusconi's justice reforms, and campaigned alongside the girotondi movement.
Go to Profile#469
Paul Finkelman
#5373
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Paul Finkelman is an American legal historian. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books on American legal and constitutional history, slavery, general American history and baseball. In addition, he has authored more than 200 scholarly articles on these and many other subjects. From 2017 - 2022, Finkelman served as the President and Chancellor of Gratz College, Melrose Park, Pennsylvania .
Go to Profile#470
John W. Boyer
#22233
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John W. Boyer is an American historian and academic administrator. He is Senior Advisor to the President and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He served as Dean of the College from 1992 until 2023, making him the longest-tenured dean in the College's history.
Go to Profile#471
Linda K. Kerber
#26254
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Linda Kaufman Kerber is an American feminist, a political and intellectual historian, and educator who specializes in the history and development of the democratic mind in America, and the history of women in America.
Go to Profile#472
Tirthankar Roy
#23103
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Tirthankar Roy is an Indian economic historian and Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics. He is one of the most influential researchers of the Economic History of South Asia and India, having published over 25 books and numerous articles. His work spans the fields of Economic History, Business History and Social History, particularly studying the effects of British colonialism in India on its economic development.
Go to Profile#473
Anand Yang
#9298
Overall Influence
Anand A. Yang is a history professor at the University of Washington, United States. He has also served as the Chair of the University of Washington's Department of History and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. From 2006 to 2007, he served as the President for the Association for Asian Studies, and from 2007 to 2009 he was the President of the World History Association. His scholarship has focused on agricultural and peasant life in colonial India, social history, law and criminality, and life in Indian markets.
Go to Profile#474
Irwin Unger
#23244
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Irwin Unger was an American historian and academic specializing in economic history, the history of the 1960s, and the history of the Gilded Age. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1958 and is currently Professor Emeritus of History at New York University.
Go to Profile#475
Jane Humphries
#20720
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Katherine Jane Humphries, CBE FBA , is a Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford with the Title of Distinction of professor of economic history. Her research interest has been in economic growth and development and the industrial revolution. She is the former president of the Economic History Society and the current vice-president of the Economic History Association.
Go to Profile#476
Albert M. Craig
#18552
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Albert Morton Craig was an American academic, historian, author and professor emeritus in the Department of History at Harvard University. Early life As a youth in Chicago, Craig was an Eagle Scout, and also participated in both competitive swimming and judo. A more scholarly interest in Japan was piqued after the Second World War. While doing counterintelligence work for the United States Army in 1946 and 1947, he was stationed in Miyazaki and in Kyoto. While in Kyoto, he earned a third degree black belt in judo.
Go to Profile#477
Richard H. Tilly
#23319
Overall Influence
1932 - 2023 (91 years)
Richard Hugh Tilly was an American economic historian. Born to a family of German descent in Chicago, Richard Tilly studied history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. From 1955 to 1957, he completed his military service largely in Germany, where he learned the language of his grandfather and, in 1960, married his wife Elisabeth, of Würzburg. After working for an insurance company, Tilly continued his studies, earning his Ph.D. in economics in 1964 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, after two years of intensive research in Germany. After holding positions in Ann Arbor and Yale, h...
Go to Profile#478
Jan Plamper
#26627
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Jan Plamper is a German professor of history at the University of Limerick. His research interests include Russian history, the history of emotions, sensory history, and the history of migration. After obtaining a B.A. in History at Brandeis University in 1992, Plamper did social work for Memorial in St. Petersburg.
Go to Profile#479
Sidney Pollard
#30989
Overall Influence
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
Siegfried Sidney Pollard was a British economic and labour historian, and Professor at the University of Sheffield. He pioneered the study of the role of economic management in the processes of industrialization - an industrialization which he thought was best examined at regional levels rather than national levels.
Go to Profile#480
David Brading
#14444
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
David Anthony Brading FRHistS, FBA , is a British historian and Professor Emeritus of Mexican History at the University of Cambridge, where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall and an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College. His work has been recognized with multiple awards including the Bolton Prize in 1972, the Order of the Aztec Eagle, and the Medalla 1808—both of which were awarded by the Mexican government—and the Medal of Congress from the Peruvian government in 2011.
Go to Profile#481
Valery Yemelyanov
#7011
Overall Influence
1929 - 1999 (70 years)
Valery Nikolayevich Yemelyanov was a Soviet-Russian Arabist and public figure, teacher of Arabic and Hebrew, and candidate of economic sciences. One of the founders of Russian neo-paganism, a representative of the "first wave" of the Russian neo-pagan movement, the creator of a pseudo-historical concept of the ancient civilization of the "Aryans-Veneti", and an author of antisemitic ideas. He was the founder and chairman of World Anti-Zionist and Anti-Masonic Front "Pamyat" and author of the books Dezionization and Jewish Nazism and the Asiatic Mode of Production.
Go to Profile#482
Drew R. McCoy
#12292
Overall Influence
Drew. R. McCoy is an American historian and specialist in American political and intellectual history. McCoy was educated at Cornell University and the University of Virginia . He has taught American history at the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard University, and, most recently, Clark University, where he is currently the Jacob and Frances Hiatt Professor of History. His focus is on early American history from the colonial era through the Civil War era of the mid-nineteenth century. His two books cover a general study of political economy in Revolutionary and Early National America, an...
Go to Profile#483
George Mosse
#9050
Overall Influence
1918 - 1999 (81 years)
Gerhard "George" Lachmann Mosse was an American historian, who emigrated from Nazi Germany to Great Britain, and then to the United States. He was professor of history at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and also in Israel, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Best known for his studies of Nazism, he authored more than 25 books on topics as diverse as constitutional history, Protestant theology, and the history of masculinity. In 1966, he and Walter Laqueur founded The Journal of Contemporary History, which they co-edited.
Go to Profile#484
Peter Frankopan
#17594
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Peter Frankopan is a British historian, writer, and hotelier. He is a professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is best known for his 2015 book The Silk Roads.
Go to Profile#485
Paul Addison
#13834
Overall Influence
1943 - 2020 (77 years)
Paul Addison was a British historian known for his research on the political history of Britain during the Second World War and the post-war period. Addison was part of the first generation of academic historians to study the conflict and is most notable for The Road to 1945 which traced the origins of the post-war consensus into the wartime period.
Go to Profile#486
Richard Foltz
#4735
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Richard Foltz is a Canadian scholar of American origin. He is a specialist in the history of Iranian civilization—what is sometimes referred to as "Greater Iran". He has also been active in the areas of environmental ethics and animal rights.
Go to Profile#487
Richard N. Frye
#7713
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Richard Nelson Frye was an American scholar of Iranian and Central Asian studies, and Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Harvard University. His professional areas of interest were Iranian philology and the history of Iran and Central Asia before 1000 CE.
Go to Profile#488
Vijay Prashad
#5153
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Vijay Prashad is an American-based Indian historian, author, journalist, political commentator, and Marxist intellectual. He is the executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Editor of LeftWord Books, Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter, and a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. For Tricontinental, he writes a weekly newsletter. Ideologically a Marxist, Prashad is well known for his criticisms of capitalism, neocolonialism, American exceptionalism, and Western imperialism, while expressing support for co...
Go to Profile#489
Ute Frevert
#15925
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ute Frevert is a German historian. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary German history, as well as social and gender history. In January 2008, she was appointed managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and director of the Institute's Center for History of Emotions in Berlin.
Go to Profile#490
Mark Sedgwick
#11155
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mark J. Sedgwick is a British historian of Islam. He is Full Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. Sedgwick is notable for pioneering historical research into the religious movement called Traditionalism.
Go to Profile#491
William R. Ferris
#14303
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
William Reynolds Ferris Jr. is an American author and scholar and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. With Judy Peiser he co-founded the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Tennessee; he was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and is co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
Go to Profile#492
James Lockhart
#10514
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
James Lockhart was a U.S. historian of colonial Spanish America, especially the Nahua people and Nahuatl language. Born in Huntington, West Virginia, Lockhart attended West Virginia University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison . Late in life, Lockhart wrote a short, candid memoir. He joined the US Army and was posted to Germany, working in "a low-level intelligence agency," translating letters from East Germany. Returning to the US, he entered the graduate program at University of Wisconsin, where he pursued his doctorate in the social history of conquest-era Peru.
Go to Profile#493
Aleksander Gieysztor
#11564
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Aleksander Gieysztor was a Polish medievalist historian. Life Aleksander Gieysztor was born to a Polish family in Moscow, Russia, where his father worked as a railwayman. In 1921, the family relocated to Poland and settled in Warsaw. He graduated in history from the University of Warsaw in 1937.
Go to Profile#494
Rodney Hilton
#18680
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Rodney Howard Hilton was an English Marxist historian of the late medieval period and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Biography Hilton was born in Middleton in Lancashire. He studied at Manchester Grammar School and arrived at Balliol College, Oxford in 1935. There he joined the student branch of the Communist Party. The influence of his tutors V. H. Galbraith and R. W. Southern drew him to medieval history. He acquired a first-class degree in modern history in 1938, was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford 1939-1940, and took his DPhil in 1940, writing his diss...
Go to Profile#495
Alison Weir
#12266
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Alison Weir is a British author and public historian. She primarily writes about the history of English royal women and families, in the form of biographies that explore their historical setting. She has also written numerous works of historical fiction.
Go to Profile#496
Moshe Lewin
#12792
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Moshe "Misha" Lewin was a scholar of Russian and Soviet history. He was a major figure in the school of Soviet studies which emerged in the 1960s. Biography Moshe Lewin was born in 1921 in Wilno, Poland , the son of ethnic Jewish parents who were later murdered in the Holocaust. Lewin lived in Poland for the first 20 years of his life, fleeing to the Soviet Union in June 1941 just ahead of the invading Nazi army.
Go to Profile#497
Geoffrey Jones
#13893
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Geoffrey G. Jones is a British-born business historian. He became a US citizen in 2010. He is currently Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at the Harvard Business School. The previous holders of this Chair, which was the first in the world in business history being founded in 1927, included Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and Thomas K. McCraw.
Go to Profile#498
Susan Pedersen
#21619
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Susan Pedersen is a Canadian historian, and James P. Shenton Professor of the Core Curriculum at Columbia University. Pedersen focuses on 19th and 20th century British history, women's history, settler colonialism, and the history of international institutions.
Go to Profile#499
Cyril Toumanoff
#14835
Overall Influence
1913 - 1997 (84 years)
Cyril Leo Toumanoff was a Russian-born Georgian historian and genealogist who mostly specialized in the history and genealogies of medieval Georgia, Armenia, Iran and the Byzantine Empire. His works have significantly influenced the Western scholarship of the medieval Caucasus.
Go to Profile#500
Juan Cole
#5005
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
John Ricardo Irfan "Juan" Cole is an American academic and commentator on the modern Middle East and South Asia. He is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Since 2002, he has written a weblog, Informed Comment .
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