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.
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#3951
Hermann Guthe
1849 - 1936 (87 years)
Hermann Guthe was a German Semitic scholar. He was educated at Göttingen and Erlangen, and afterwards worked for several years as a private tutor. In 1884 he became a professor of Old Testament exegesis at Leipzig University.
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Theophilus Siegfried Bayer
1694 - 1738 (44 years)
Theophilus Siegfried Bayer , was a German classical scholar with specialization in Sinology. He was a Sinologist and professor of Greek and Roman Antiquities at St Petersburg Academy of Sciences between 1726 and 1737.
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Johannes Rahder
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Johannes Rahder , Dutch Orientalist, professor of Japanese at the University of Leiden and Yale University . Biography Rahder was born in Lubuk Begalung, the Dutch East Indies, now a subdistrict of Padang, where his father was governor of the west coast of Sumatra. The fact that he requested as a birthday present a library when he was five years old suggests that he was a precocious child.
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Nikolay Veselovsky
1848 - 1918 (70 years)
Nikolai Ivanovich Veselovsky was a Russian archaeologist and orientalist. Born in Moscow, Veselovsky went to school in Vologda, and then studied at Saint Petersburg State University. Reader in 1877, extraordinarius in 1884, ordinarius from 1890.
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John Wesley Hill
1863 - 1936 (73 years)
John Wesley Hill was an American Methodist minister, political activist, author, and the chancellor of Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, from 1916 to 1936. Early life Hill was born on May 8, 1863, in Kalida, Ohio. Hill's father was John Wesley Hill . Hill's mother was Elizabeth Hughes Hill . Hill attended Ohio Northern University and then took classes at the Methodist Boston Theological Seminary.
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George A. Kennedy
1901 - 1960 (59 years)
George Alexander Kennedy , was an American sinologist known for his studies of classical Chinese and for his teaching of Chinese to students. Life and career George Kennedy was born on 17 May 1901 in Moganshan, Zhejiang Province, China, where his parents Alexander and Ada Kennedy were serving as Protestant missionaries. Although his family spoke English at home, Kennedy grew up speaking the local Chinese dialect, a form of Wu Chinese, and often said that Chinese was his native language. The Kennedy family left China in 1918 after George's father and brother Fred died less than a month apart. They returned to the United States, where Kennedy attended the College of Wooster.
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Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare
1856 - 1924 (68 years)
Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, was a British orientalist, Fellow of University College, Oxford, and Professor of Theology at the University of Oxford. Biography Conybeare was born in Coulsdon, Surrey, the third son of a barrister, John Charles Conybeare, and grandson of the geologist William Daniel Conybeare. He took an interest in the Order of Corporate Reunion, an Old Catholic organization, becoming a Bishop in it in 1894. Also in the 1890s he wrote a book on the Dreyfus case, as a Dreyfusard, and translated the Testament of Solomon and other early Christian texts. As well, he did influential work on Barlaam and Josaphat.
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Carl Robert Osten-Sacken
1828 - 1906 (78 years)
Carl Robert Osten-Sacken or Carl-Robert Romanovich, Baron von der Osten-Sacken, Baron Osten Sacken was a Russian diplomat and entomologist. He served as the Russian consul general in New York City during the American Civil War, living in the United States from 1856 to 1877. He worked on the taxonomy of flies in general and particularly of the family Tipulidae .
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Thomas Hyde
1636 - 1703 (67 years)
Thomas Hyde was an English linguist, historian, librarian, classicist, and orientalist. His chief work was the 1700 [On the Ancient Religion of the Persians], the first attempt to use Arab and Persian sources to correct the errors of Greek and Roman historians in their descriptions of Zoroastrianism and the other beliefs of the ancient Persians.
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Joseph White
1745 - 1814 (69 years)
Joseph White was an English orientalist and theologian, Laudian Professor of Arabic and then Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford. Early life and career He was born in Gloucestershire, the son of Thomas White, a journeyman weaver. He received his earliest education in one of the Gloucester charity schools, and started life in his father's employment. Wealthy neighbours enabled him to pursue his studies at Ruscomb and Gloucester, and with support from John Moore he entered Wadham College, Oxford, as a commoner on 6 June 1765. In September of that year he became scholar of his...
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Ferdinand Justi
1837 - 1907 (70 years)
Ferdinand Justi was a German linguist and Orientalist. He finished his studies of linguistics at the University of Marburg and the University of Göttingen. In 1861 he lived in Marburg, where in 1865 he became associate and in 1869 full professor of comparative linguistics and Germanic philology.
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Adriaan Reland
1676 - 1718 (42 years)
Adriaan Reland was a noted Dutch Orientalist scholar, cartographer and philologist. Even though he never left the Netherlands, or visited the Holy Land, he made significant contributions to Middle Eastern and Asian linguistics and cartography, including Persia, Japan and the Holy Lands.
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Friedrich Carl Andreas
1846 - 1930 (84 years)
Friedrich Carl Andreas was an orientalist of German, Malay, and Armenian parentage . He was the husband of psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé. He received his education in Iranian and other oriental studies at several German universities, obtaining his doctorate at Erlangen in 1868 with a thesis on the Pahlavi language. Following graduation, he continued his research of Pahlavi in Copenhagen. From 1875 he spent several years conducting field studies in Persia and India, during which time, he also worked as a postmaster.
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Hendrik Arent Hamaker
1789 - 1835 (46 years)
Hendrik Arent Hamaker was a Dutch Assyriologist, philologist and orientalist. He studied most European and Asian languages, and the history and geography of the East. He was an associate of the orientalist Johannes Hendricus van der Palm, and Theodor Juynboll was among his pupils.
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Samuel Johnson
1649 - 1703 (54 years)
Samuel Johnson was an English clergyman and political writer, sometimes called "the Whig" to distinguish him from the author and lexicographer of the same name. He is one of the best known pamphlet writers who developed Whig resistance theory.
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George Hermonymus
1452 - 1508 (56 years)
George Hermonymus , also known as Hermonymus of Sparta, was a 15th-century Greek scribe, diplomat, scholar and lecturer. He was the first person to teach Greek at the Collège de Sorbonne in Paris. Life Although he claimed to originally be from Sparta, that city no longer existed in the 15th century, so it most likely referred to Mystra, the second largest city in the rapidly decaying Byzantine Empire of the time. Mystra was located in the hills overlooking the ancient ruins of Sparta, was the centre of a major revival in Greek literature at the time, and was the home of Gemistus Pletho.
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Robert Wood
1717 - 1771 (54 years)
Robert Wood was an Irish-British traveller, classical scholar, civil servant and politician. He was the son of the Revd James Wood of Summerhill, County Meath and educated at Glasgow University and the Middle Temple . His father was a patron of Hercules Rowley of Summerhill House.
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Eugen Prym
1843 - 1913 (70 years)
Eugen Prym was a German orientalist, who specialized in Semitic languages, especially Arabic and Aramaic. He was the brother of mathematician Friedrich Prym , and is the great-great grandfather of historian, philosopher, and MacArthur Fellow Jacob Soll.
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William Hunter
1774 - 1849 (75 years)
William Hunter Jr. was an American politician and diplomat and owner of the Hunter House, now a museum. Life and career Hunter was born in Newport, Rhode Island, as the youngest son of seven children of Debora Malbone Hunter and Dr. William Hunter, a prominent Newport doctor, scholar and merchant. He attended the Rogers School and graduated from the College of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at Providence in 1791. In 1791 he went to England to study medicine, but when he arrived there he changed his mind and studied law. He returned to the United States in 1793 and established a law practice in Newport.
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Julián Ribera
1858 - 1934 (76 years)
Julián Ribera y Tarragó was a Spanish Arabist and academic. Career Ribera studied under Prof. Francisco Codera y Zaidín at Madrid from 1882 to 1885. In 1887 at age 29 he became catedrático of Arabic at the University of Zaragoza. There Prof. Ribera founded the Revista de Aragón. Later, in Madrid he co-founded the journal Cultura Española . He had transferred from Zaragoza to become catedrático of History at the University of Madrid, then of Literature in 1913. Prof. Ribera and his former student Prof. Asín collaborated on various academic projects. His career was celebrated by his peers in his Jubilación of 1927.
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Marie-Louise Puech-Milhau
1876 - 1966 (90 years)
Marie-Louise Puech-Milhau was a French pacifist, feminist and journal editor. In 1900, she went to Canada where she became a lecturer at McGill University until 1908 when she returned to France. In 1911, she subscribed to the newspaper La Française, the source of her appetite for feminism. After the end of the First World War, she became Secretary of the Union pour le Suffrage des Femmes and President of the Union Féminine pour la Société des Nations. She is also remembered for the extensive correspondence she maintained with family members, former students and war veterans.
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Ruth E. Bacon
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Ruth Elizabeth Bacon was an American foreign service officer, a Far East specialist. She was one of the first six annual recipients of the Federal Woman's Award, in 1961. In 1968, she retired as director of the Office of Regional Affairs in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, at the United States Department of State.
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John Stallo
1823 - 1900 (77 years)
John Bernhard Stallo was a German-American academic, jurist, philosopher, and ambassador. Early life Stallo was born in Sierhausen in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg on March 16, 1823, the son of a schoolmaster, Johann Heinrich Stallo and his wife, Anna Maria Adelheid Moormann . Stallo studied at home and at a free, Catholic normal school at Vechta. Because the family lacked the funds to send him to a gymnasium , Stallo emigrated to the United States in 1839, establishing himself in Cincinnati, Ohio, not far from his uncle, the utopian socialist, Franz Joseph Stallo,, where many other family...
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William Bayard Cutting Jr.
1878 - 1910 (32 years)
William Bayard Cutting Jr. was an American diplomat who served as secretary to the U.S. embassy to the Court of St. James's. Early life Cutting was born in New York City on June 13, 1878, and grew up at Westbrook, the family estate in Long Island. He was the eldest of four children born to William Bayard Cutting and Olivia Peyton Cutting . His younger siblings included Justine Bayard Cutting, Bronson Murray Cutting, a U.S. Senator, and Olivia Murray Cutting, who married Henry James.
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John Lindsay
1737 - 1788 (51 years)
Rear Admiral Sir John Lindsay, was a British naval officer of the 18th century, who achieved the rank of admiral late in his career. Joining the Navy during the Seven Years' War, he served off France, followed by service for several years as captain of a warship stationed in the West Indies. After war's end, he returned to Britain, serving as an MP for Aberdeen Burghs from 1767 to 1768. From August 1769 to March 1772 Lindsay was promoted to commodore and assigned as commander-in-chief of the East Indies Station. He resigned from the Navy for a period following the Battle of Ushant off the coast of France, during the American War of Independence.
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Cecil Parrott
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Sir Cecil Cuthbert Parrott was a British diplomat, translator, writer and scholar. After studies at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he became a teacher. He joined the Foreign Office in 1939. His diplomatic career culminated with his posting to Prague, where he was the British Ambassador from 1960 to 1966. On retiring from the Foreign Office, he became first Professor of Russian and Soviet Studies and later Professor of Central and South-Eastern European Studies and Director of the Comenius Centre at the University of Lancaster.
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Georg Heinrich Bernstein
1787 - 1860 (73 years)
Georg Heinrich Bernstein was a German orientalist. Biography He was born at Cospeda, near Jena. He studied at the universities of Jena, Leipzig, and Göttingen, and in 1812 became an associate professor of oriental literature at the University of Berlin. In 1820 he was appointed a full professor at the University of Breslau. He died in Lauban.
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John Carey
1490 - 1552 (62 years)
Sir John Cary , of Pleshey in Essex, was a courtier to King Henry VIII, whom he served as a Groom of the Privy Chamber, and of whom he was a third cousin, both being 4th in descent from John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset .
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Wilhelm Ahlwardt
1828 - 1909 (81 years)
Wilhelm Ahlwardt was a German orientalist who specialized in research of Arabic literature. He was the son of philologist Christian Wilhelm Ahlwardt . Biography He studied oriental philology at the University of Greifswald as a student of Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten and at the University of Göttingen under Heinrich Ewald. After graduation, he spent several years studying Arab manuscripts in libraries at Gotha and Paris. In 1856 he began work as an assistant librarian at Greifswald, obtaining his habilitation during the following year. In 1861 he became a professor at the university.
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Isaac Hollister Hall
1837 - 1896 (59 years)
Isaac Hollister Hall was an American Orientalist. Biography He was born in Norwalk, Connecticut. He graduated at Hamilton College in 1859, was a tutor there in 1859–1863, graduated from Columbia Law School in 1865, practised law in New York City until 1875, and, during 1875–1877, taught in the Syrian Protestant College at Beirut, where he discovered a valuable Syriac manuscript of the Philoxenian version of a large part of the New Testament, which he published in part in facsimile in 1884.
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Rudolf Ernst Brünnow
1858 - 1917 (59 years)
Rudolph Ernst Brünnow was a German-American orientalist and philologist. Life The son of the Berlin-born astronomer Franz Friedrich Ernst Brünnow, Rudolph Ernst was born during the period his father was living in the United States. In 1863 the father and son returned to Europe. In 1882 he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Strasbourg.
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Peter van Bohlen
1796 - 1840 (44 years)
Peter von Bohlen was a German Orientalist and Indologist. He was a professor at the University of Königsberg. He spent the first 20 years of his life in strained circumstances. His talents and perseverance attracted attention, and he obtained admission to the Hamburg gymnasium. He afterward studied the Eastern languages at Halle and Bonn. He then obtained an appointment at Königsberg, first in 1825 as extraordinary, and afterward in 1830 as ordinary professor of oriental literature.
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Helen Brewster Owens
1881 - 1968 (87 years)
Helen Brewster Owens was an American suffragist and mathematician. Early life and education Helen Brewster Owens was born April 2, 1881, in Pleasanton, Kansas, to Clara and Robert Edward Brewster. Her mother, who was a teacher and president of the Lincoln County Women's Suffrage Association, prompted Brewster's interest in the movement from a young age. As a girl, she attended the 1893 County Fair with her mother where she helped distribute flyers of Frances Willard.
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Lawrence A. Kimpton
1910 - 1973 (63 years)
Lawrence Alpheus Kimpton was an American philosopher and educator, and a president of the University of Chicago. He earned a B.A. at Stanford and a Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell University, and he taught at Deep Springs College before joining Chicago as a professor of philosophy in 1943.
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Alexander Hemphill
1921 - 1986 (65 years)
Alexander Hemphill was a Democratic lawyer and politician from Philadelphia who served as City Controller from 1958 to 1968. After service in World War II and graduation from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Hemphill embarked on a legal career before running for office. In his three terms as city controller, he exposed corruption and malfeasance, often to the discomfort of his fellow Democrats. He ran for mayor of Philadelphia in 1967 against the incumbent Democrat, James Tate, but was unsuccessful, and retired to a private law practice until his death in 1986.
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Jacob Alting
1618 - 1679 (61 years)
Jacob Alting studied in Groningen and was ordained as a Church of England priest. He was named professor of theology at Groningen University in 1667 after holding the chair of oriental languages since 1641. His publications were overseen in 1687 by Balthasar Bekker, and argued with Maresius on biblical exegesis when the latter accused him of heterodoxy .
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Arthur Lindsay Sadler
1882 - 1970 (88 years)
Arthur Lindsay Sadler was Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Sydney. Life and career Sadler was born in Hackney, London and educated at the University of Oxford . From 1909 he worked in Japan as a teacher and was an active member of the Asiatic Society of Japan.
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Richard Bennett
1609 - 1675 (66 years)
Richard Bennett was an English planter and Governor of the Colony of Virginia, serving 1652–1655. He had first come to the Virginia colony in 1629 to represent his merchant uncle Edward Bennett's business, managing his plantation known as Bennett's Welcome in Warrascoyack . Two decades later, Bennett immigrated to the Maryland colony with his family, and settled on the Severn River in Anne Arundel County.
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David Kelly
1891 - 1959 (68 years)
Sir David Victor Kelly was a British diplomat who was Minister to Switzerland and Ambassador to Argentina, Turkey, and the Soviet Union. Education Kelly was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a demy and gained a first class degree in modern history in 1913.
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Sixtinus Amama
1593 - 1629 (36 years)
Sixtinus Amama was a Dutch Reformed theologian and orientalist. Amama was among the first to advocate a thorough knowledge of the original languages of the Bible as indispensable to theologians. Life He was born in Franeker, in the Dutch province of Friesland. He studied oriental languages from 1610 at the University of Franeker and then at the University of Oxford, attracted there by John Prideaux. In 1614 he took up also the study of Arabic at the University of Leyden where he made the acquaintance of Thomas Erpenius.
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Franciscus Raphelengius
1539 - 1597 (58 years)
Frans van Ravelingen Latinized Franciscus Raphelengius , was a Flemish-born scholar, printer and publisher, working in Antwerp and later in Leiden. During the last decade of his life he was professor of Hebrew at Leiden University. He produced an Arabic-Latin dictionary, of about 550 pages, which was published posthumously in 1613 in Leiden. This was the first publication by printing press of a book-length dictionary for the Arabic language in Latin.
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Li Tieh-tseng
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Li Tieh-tseng was a Chinese ambassador.In 1928, shortly after graduation, he was appointed county magistrate of Nan County but was forced to leave.Since then he taught at the School of Law at the Wuhan University.From 1932 to 1936 he was secretary of the embassy in London, the capital of the United Kingdom.From 1937 to 1942 he was minister next to Reza Shah in Tehran with concurrent accreditation in Baghdad .From until he was ambassador in Tehran with concurrent accreditation in Baghdad.On he was designated ambassador to Bangkok where he was accredited from till .In 1949 he was resident...
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Richard Parker
1810 - 1893 (83 years)
Richard Parker was a nineteenth-century politician, lawyer, and judge from Virginia. Biography Born in Richmond, Virginia, son of Judge and Senator Richard E. Parker. Parker studied law at the University of Virginia, and was admitted to the bar, commencing practice in Berryville, Virginia, near Winchester, where he lived. He was the paymaster at the Harpers Ferry Armory, and was also a slave owner.
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John Richardson
1667 - 1753 (86 years)
John Richardson was an English Quaker minister and autobiographer. Early life John Richardson was born in 1667, probably in the village of North Cave, East Riding of Yorkshire, where his father, William Richardson , a shepherd, had been converted to Quakerism by William Dewsberry or Dewsbury in about 1652. He was twelve when his father died, leaving his mother with a livestock farm to run and five children. John had one older sister, who died about 1682, and three younger brothers, of whom the youngest was born about 1676.
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Reinhart Dozy
1820 - 1883 (63 years)
Reinhart Pieter Anne Dozy was a Dutch scholar of French origin, who was born in Leiden. He was an Orientalist scholar of Arabic language, history and literature. Biography The Dozys, like other contemporary French families, emigrated to the Low Countries after the revocation of the edict of Nantes, but some of the former appear to have settled in the Netherlands as early as 1647. Dozy studied at the University of Leiden, obtained the degree of doctor in 1844, was appointed an extraordinary professor of history in 1850, and professor in 1857. Dozy was a correspondent of the Royal Institute between 1848 and 1851.
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Nathan Smith
1770 - 1835 (65 years)
#3997
Valentine de Balla
1899 - 1957 (58 years)
Valentine de Balla , also known as Valentin de Balla and Valentin Balla de Iregh, was a Hungarian political scientist who taught at several American colleges from the 1930s to the 1950s. Born on October 23, 1899, in Újvidék, Hungary , de Balla graduated from the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt, and then from the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied international law. He then studied at Johns Hopkins University, where he received the Ph.D. . His dissertation, "The New Balance of Power in Europe," was published the following year by The Johns Hopkins Press.
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Aaron Ward
1790 - 1867 (77 years)
Aaron Ward was an American lawyer and politician from New York. He served three separate stints in the U.S. House of Representatives during the early-to-mid-19th Century. Life He was born in Sing Sing, Westchester County, New York the son of Moses Ward. He completed preparatory studies in Mount Pleasant Academy, and then studied law. At the beginning of the War of 1812 he was commissioned a lieutenant in the 29th Regiment of Infantry, and in 1814 commissioned a captain. Afterwards he continued to serve in the State Militia, and in 1830 he was promoted to major general. After the war, he resu...
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Italo Pizzi
1849 - 1920 (71 years)
Italo Pizzi was an Italian academic and scholar of Persian language and literature. He was the first to establish the academic field of Persian language and literature in Italy. Biography From a noble family, at age fifteen Pizzi showed a particular interest in studies of oriental languages and in high school he was encouraged by his Latin and Greek teacher, a Sanskritist, to deepen those studies.
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Paul L. Adams
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Paul Lincoln Adams was an American lawyer, politician, and judge from Michigan. He served as a mayor of Sault Ste. Marie, as a member of the University of Michigan Board of Regents, as Michigan Attorney General, and as a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court.
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