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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in History,
#1
Eric Hobsbawm
#166
Overall Influence
1917 - 2012 (95 years)
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. His best-known works include his tetralogy about what he called the "long 19th century" and the "short 20th century" , and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions". A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work.
Go to Profile#2
Howard Zinn
#262
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Howard Zinn was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist intellectual and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote over 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States in 1980. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People's History of the United States.
Go to Profile#3
Stephen Jay Gould
#40
Overall Influence
1941 - 2002 (61 years)
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.
Go to Profile#4
Richard J. Evans
#826
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#5
Bernard Lewis
#204
Overall Influence
1916 - 2018 (102 years)
Bernard Lewis, was a British American historian specialized in Oriental studies. He was also known as a public intellectual and political commentator. Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Lewis's expertise was in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West.
Go to Profile#6
David Irving
#384
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
David John Cawdell Irving is an English author who has written on the military and political history of World War II, and especially Nazi Germany, who was declared to be a Holocaust denier in a UK court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.
Go to Profile#7
Niall Ferguson
#385
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#8
Eric Foner
#759
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Eric Foner is an American historian. He writes extensively on American political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and historiography, and has been a member of the faculty at the Columbia University Department of History since 1982. He is the author of several popular textbooks. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Foner is the most frequently cited author on college syllabi for history courses.
Go to Profile#9
Ernst Nolte
#713
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Ernst Nolte was a German historian and philosopher. Nolte's major interest was the comparative studies of fascism and communism . Originally trained in philosophy, he was professor emeritus of modern history at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 until his 1991 retirement. He was previously a professor at the University of Marburg from 1965 to 1973. He was best known for his seminal work Fascism in Its Epoch, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1963. Nolte was a prominent conservative academic from the early 1960s and was involved in many controvers...
Go to Profile#10
Thomas Kuhn
#39
Overall Influence
1922 - 1996 (74 years)
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.
Go to Profile#11
Isaiah Berlin
#89
Overall Influence
1909 - 1997 (88 years)
Sir Isaiah Berlin was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and many of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy.
Go to Profile#12
Hans-Ulrich Wehler
#959
Overall Influence
1931 - 2014 (83 years)
Hans-Ulrich Wehler was a German left-liberal historian known for his role in promoting social history through the "Bielefeld School", and for his critical studies of 19th-century Germany. Life Wehler was born in Freudenberg, Westphalia. He studied history and sociology in Cologne, Bonn and, on a Fulbright scholarship, at Ohio University in the United States; working for six months as a welder and a truck driver in Los Angeles. He took his PhD in 1960 under Theodor Schieder at the University of Cologne. His dissertation examined social democracy and the nation state and the question of nationality in Germany between 1840 and 1914.
Go to Profile#13
Robert Fogel
#628
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Robert William Fogel was an American economic historian and scientist, and winner of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As of his death, he was the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions and director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He is best known as an advocate of new economic history – the use of quantitative methods in history.
Go to Profile#14
George F. Kennan
#238
Overall Influence
1904 - 2005 (101 years)
George Frost Kennan was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men."
Go to Profile#15
Ron Chernow
#584
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ronald Chernow is an American writer, journalist, and biographer. He has written bestselling historical non-fiction biographies. Chernow won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2011 American History Book Prize for his 2010 book Washington: A Life. He is also the recipient of the National Book Award for Nonfiction for his 1990 book The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance. His biographies of Alexander Hamilton and John D. Rockefeller were both nominated for National Book Critics Circle Awards. His biography of Hamilton inspired the popular Hamilton musical, which Chernow worked on as a historical consultant.
Go to Profile#16
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
#1142
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Emmanuel Bernard Le Roy Ladurie was a French historian whose work was mainly focused upon Languedoc in the Ancien Régime, particularly the history of the peasantry. One of the leading historians of France, Le Roy Ladurie has been called the "standard-bearer" of the third generation of the Annales school and the "rock star of the medievalists", noted for his work in social history.
Go to Profile#17
David McCullough
#764
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
David Gaub McCullough was an American popular historian. He was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 2006, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.
Go to Profile#18
Ram Sharan Sharma
#1342
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Ram Sharan Sharma was an Indian Marxist historian and Indologist who specialised in the history of Ancient and early Medieval India. He taught at Patna University and Delhi University and was visiting faculty at University of Toronto . He also was a senior fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was a University Grants Commission National Fellow and the president of Indian History Congress in 1975. It was during his tenure as the dean of Delhi University's History Department that major expansion of the department took place in the 1970s. The creation of most of the positions in the department were the results of his efforts.
Go to Profile#19
Romila Thapar
#1414
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
#20
E. P. Thompson
#465
Overall Influence
1924 - 1993 (69 years)
Edward Palmer Thompson was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is best known today for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class .
Go to Profile#21
Hugh Trevor-Roper
#738
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany. In the view of John Kenyon, "some of [Trevor-Roper's] short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books". This is echoed by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman in the introduction to One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper : "The bulk of his publications is formidable...
Go to Profile#22
Ramachandra Guha
#1301
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ramachandra "Ram" Guha is an Indian historian, environmentalist, writer and public intellectual whose research interests include social, political, contemporary, environmental and cricket history, and the field of economics. He is an important authority on the history of modern India.
Go to Profile#23
Immanuel Wallerstein
#352
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein was an American sociologist and economic historian. He is perhaps best known for his development of the general approach in sociology which led to the emergence of his world-systems approach. He was a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University from 2000 until his death in 2019, and published bimonthly syndicated commentaries through Agence Global on world affairs from October 1998 to July 2019.
Go to Profile#24
Geoffrey Elton
#3145
Overall Influence
1921 - 1994 (73 years)
Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton was a German-born British political and constitutional historian, specialising in the Tudor period. He taught at Clare College, Cambridge, and was the Regius Professor of Modern History there from 1983 to 1988.
Go to Profile#25
Quentin Skinner
#977
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner is a British intellectual historian. He is regarded as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Wolfson History Prize in 1979 and the Balzan Prize in 2006. Between 1996 and 2008 he was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. He is the Emeritus Professor of the Humanities and Co-director of The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London.
Go to Profile#26
Irfan Habib
#1960
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Irfan Habib is an Indian Marxist historian of ancient and medieval India, following the methodology of Marxist historiography in his contributions to economic history. He identifies as a Marxist and is well known for his strong stance against Hindutva and Islamic fundamentalism. He has authored a number of books, notably the Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707, an Atlas of the Mughal Empire: Political and Economic Maps With Detailed Notes, and an Atlas of Ancient Indian History . As the general editor, he is also the driving force behind the A People's History of India series, volumes ...
Go to Profile#27
Jürgen Kocka
#3565
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Jürgen Kocka is a German historian. A university professor and former president of the Social Science Research Center Berlin , Kocka is a major figure in the new Social History, especially as represented by the Bielefeld School. He has focused his research on the history of employees in large German and American businesses, and on the history of European bourgeoisie.
Go to Profile#28
James M. McPherson
#1997
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
#29
Bernard Bailyn
#1422
Overall Influence
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Bernard Bailyn was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1953. Bailyn won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice . In 1998 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture. He was a recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal.
Go to Profile#30
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#236
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer. A prominent Soviet dissident, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system.
Go to Profile#31
Robert Conquest
#450
Overall Influence
1917 - 2015 (98 years)
George Robert Acworth Conquest was a British-American historian and poet. He was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain but later wrote several books against Communism. A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books included The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s ; The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine ; and Stalin: Breaker of Nations . He was also the author of two novels and several collections of poetry.
Go to Profile#32
Hayden White
#878
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Hayden V. White was an American historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe . Career White received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Wayne State University and his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Michigan. While an undergraduate at Wayne State, White studied history under William J. Bossenbrook alongside then-classmate Arthur Danto.
Go to Profile#33
Gordon S. Wood
#1283
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Gordon Stewart Wood is an American historian and professor at Brown University. He is a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution . His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 won the 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
Go to Profile#34
Georges Duby
#2479
Overall Influence
1919 - 1996 (77 years)
Georges Duby was a French historian who specialised in the social and economic history of the Middle Ages. He ranks among the most influential medieval historians of the twentieth century and was one of France's most prominent public intellectuals from the 1970s to his death.
Go to Profile#35
Richard Pipes
#836
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Richard Edgar Pipes was an American academic, who specialized in Russian and Soviet history, and wrote many books on these topics, including Russia under the Old Regime , The Russian Revolution , and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime . Pipes was a frequent interviewee in the press on the matters of Soviet history and foreign affairs. His writings also appear in Commentary, The New York Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. At Harvard, he taught large courses on Imperial Russia as well as the Russian Revolution and guided over 80 graduate students to their PhDs. In 1976, he headed Team B, ...
Go to Profile#36
Jacques Le Goff
#1362
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Jacques Le Goff was a French historian and prolific author specializing in the Middle Ages, particularly the 12th and 13th centuries. Le Goff championed the Annales School movement, which emphasizes long-term trends over the topics of politics, diplomacy, and war that dominated 19th-century historical research. From 1972 to 1977, he was the head of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He was a leading figure of New History, related to cultural history. Le Goff argued that the Middle Ages formed a civilization of its own, distinct from both Classical Antiquity and ...
Go to Profile#37
John Henrik Clarke
#2100
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
John Henrik Clarke was an African-American historian, professor, prominent Afrocentrist, and pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s.
Go to Profile#38
François Furet
#2062
Overall Influence
1927 - 1997 (70 years)
François Furet was a French historian and president of the Saint-Simon Foundation, best known for his books on the French Revolution. From 1985 to 1997, Furet was a professor of French history at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#39
Simon Schama
#1136
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#40
Garry Wills
#991
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Garry Wills is an American author, journalist, political philosopher, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Catholic Church. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1993.
Go to Profile#41
Daniel J. Boorstin
#3841
Overall Influence
1914 - 2004 (90 years)
Daniel Joseph Boorstin was an American historian at the University of Chicago who wrote on many topics in American and world history. He was appointed the twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress in 1975 and served until 1987. He was instrumental in the creation of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress.
Go to Profile#42
C. Vann Woodward
#3282
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
Comer Vann Woodward was an American historian who focused primarily on the American South and race relations. He was long a supporter of the approach of Charles A. Beard, stressing the influence of unseen economic motivations in politics.
Go to Profile#43
Peter Burke
#3234
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Ulick Peter Burke is a British historian and professor. He was born to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother . From 1962 to 1979, he was a member of the School of European Studies at University of Sussex, before moving to the University of Cambridge, where he holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Cultural History and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Burke is celebrated as a historian not only of the early modern era, but one who emphasizes the relevance of social and cultural history to modern issues. He is married to the Brazilian historian Maria Lúcia Garcia Pallares-Burke who ...
Go to Profile#44
William Cronon
#3588
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
William Cronon is an environmental historian and the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was president of the American Historical Association in 2012.
Go to Profile#45
David Cannadine
#3077
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
#46
Norman Davies
#1547
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#47
Benny Morris
#1002
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Benny Morris is an Israeli historian. He was a professor of history in the Middle East Studies department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the city of Beersheba, Israel. He is a member of the group of Israeli historians known as the "New Historians", a term Morris coined to describe himself and historians Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé and Simha Flapan.
Go to Profile#48
Lawrence Stone
#3989
Overall Influence
1919 - 1999 (80 years)
Lawrence Stone was an English historian of early modern Britain, after a start to his career as an art historian of English medieval art. He is noted for his work on the English Civil War and the history of marriage, families and the aristocracy.
Go to Profile#49
Carlo Ginzburg
#1630
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Carlo Ginzburg is an Italian historian and a proponent of the field of microhistory. He is best known for Il formaggio e i vermi , which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.
Go to Profile#50
Geoffrey Blainey
#1522
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Geoffrey Norman Blainey, is an Australian historian, academic, best selling author and commentator. He is noted for having written authoritative texts on the economic and social history of Australia, including The Tyranny of Distance. He has published over 40 books, including wide-ranging histories of the world and of Christianity. He has often appeared in newspapers and on television. He held chairs in economic history and history at the University of Melbourne for over 20 years. In the 1980s, he was visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. He received the 1988 Brita...
Go to Profile