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
#6151
Andrew Vachss
#6160
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Andrew Henry Vachss was an American crime fiction author, child protection consultant, and attorney exclusively representing children and youths. Early life and career Vachss grew up in Manhattan on the Lower West Side. Before becoming a lawyer, Vachss held many front-line positions in child protection. He was a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, and a New York City social-services caseworker. He worked in Biafra, entering the war zone just before the fall of the country. There he worked to find a land route to bring donated food and medical supplies across the border aft...
Go to Profile#6152
Akiyuki Shinbo
#6161
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
is a Japanese animator, director, compositional writer, and storyboard artist. Best known for his works with Shaft, he has attained international recognition for his unique visual style and storytelling methods.
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Judd Winick
#6162
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Judd Winick is an American cartoonist, comic book writer and screenwriter, as well as a former reality television personality. He first gained fame for his stint on MTV's The Real World: San Francisco in 1994, before finding success as a comic book creator with Pedro and Me, an autobiographical graphic novel about his friendship with The Real World castmate and AIDS educator Pedro Zamora. Winick wrote lengthy runs on DC Comics' Green Lantern and Green Arrow series and created The Life and Times of Juniper Lee animated TV series for Cartoon Network, which ran for three seasons.
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John Freely
#6163
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
John Freely was an American physicist, teacher, and author of popular travel and history books on Istanbul, Athens, Venice, Turkey, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire. He was the father of writer and Turko-English literary translator Maureen Freely.
Go to Profile#6155
Krzysztof Matyjaszewski
#6164
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Krzysztof "Kris" Matyjaszewski is a Polish-American chemist. He is the J.C. Warner Professor of the Natural Sciences at the Carnegie Mellon University Matyjaszewski is best known for the discovery of atom transfer radical polymerization , a novel method of polymer synthesis that has revolutionized the way macromolecules are made.
Go to Profile#6156
Janet Mock
#6165
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Janet Mock is an American writer, television producer, and transgender rights activist. Her debut book, the memoir Redefining Realness, became a New York Times bestseller. She is a contributing editor for Marie Claire and a former staff editor of People magazine's website.
Go to Profile#6157
Mark Bagley
#6166
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Mark Bagley is an American comics artist. He has worked for Marvel Comics on such titles as The Amazing Spider-Man, Thunderbolts, New Warriors, Venom and Ultimate Spider-Man and for DC Comics on Justice League of America, Batman and Trinity.
Go to Profile#6158
Bassam Tibi
#6167
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Bassam Tibi , is a Syrian-born German political scientist and professor of international relations specializing in Islamic studies and Middle Eastern studies. He was born in 1944 in Damascus, Syria to an aristocratic family, and moved to West Germany in 1962, where he later became a naturalized citizen in 1976.
Go to Profile#6159
James Demmel
#6168
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
James Weldon Demmel Jr. is an American mathematician and computer scientist, the Dr. Richard Carl Dehmel Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#6160
Paul Willis
#6169
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Paul Willis is a British social scientist known for his work in sociology and cultural studies. Paul Willis' work is widely read in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and education, his work emphasizing consumer culture, socialization, music, and popular culture. He was born in Wolverhampton and received his education at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Birmingham. He worked at Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and subsequently at the University of Wolverhampton. He was a Professor of Social/Cultural Ethnography at Keele University. In the autumn of 2010, he...
Go to Profile#6161
Mortimer Mishkin
#6170
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Mortimer Mishkin was an American neuropsychologist, and winner of the 2009 National Medal of Science awarded in Behavior and Social Science. Life and career Born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts in December 1926, Mishkin graduated from Dartmouth College in 1946, and took a 1949 M.A. and 1951 Ph.D. from McGill University under Donald O. Hebb. His Ph.D. thesis was partly directed by surgeon and theorist Karl H. Pribram.
Go to Profile#6162
John Meyendorff
#6171
Overall Influence
1926 - 1992 (66 years)
John Meyendorff was a leading theologian of the Orthodox Church of America as well as a writer and teacher. He served as the dean of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in the United States until June 30, 1992.
Go to Profile#6163
Philip S. Yu
#6172
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Philip S. Yu is an American computer scientist and professor of information technology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a prolific author, holds over 300 patents, and is known for his work in the field of data mining.
Go to Profile#6164
A. L. Rowse
#6173
Overall Influence
1903 - 1997 (94 years)
Alfred Leslie Rowse was a British historian and writer, best known for his work on Elizabethan England and books relating to Cornwall. Born in Cornwall and raised in modest circumstances, he was encouraged to study for Oxford by fellow-Cornishman Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. He was elected a fellow of All Souls College and later appointed lecturer at Merton College. Best known of his many works was The Elizabethan Age trilogy. His work on Shakespeare included a claim to have identified the 'Dark Lady of the Sonnets' as Emilia Lanier, which attracted much interest from scholars, but also many co...
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Sidney Drell
#6174
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Sidney David Drell was an American theoretical physicist and arms control expert. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Drell was a noted contributor in the fields of quantum electrodynamics and high-energy particle physics. The Drell–Yan process, which was used to discover the Higgs boson, is partially named for him.
Go to Profile#6166
Yuan-Cheng Fung
#6175
Overall Influence
1919 - 2019 (100 years)
#6167
Friedrich Kittler
#6176
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
Friedrich A. Kittler was a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military. Biography Friedrich Adolf Kittler was born in 1943 in Rochlitz in Saxony. His family fled with him to West Germany in 1958, where from 1958 to 1963 he went to a natural sciences and modern languages Gymnasium in Lahr in the Black Forest, and thereafter, until 1972, he studied German studies, Romance philology and philosophy at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg in Freiburg im Breisgau.
Go to Profile#6168
Bradd Shore
#6177
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Bradd Shore is an American cultural anthropologist who is best known as a leading authority on Samoan culture and a foundational theorist of the cultural models school of cognitive and psychological anthropology. He is the Goodrich C. White Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Emory University and is a former Department Chair. He is the former Director of the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life and is also a past President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology .
Go to Profile#6169
Vijay P. Bhatkar
#6178
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Vijay Pandurang Bhatkar is an Indian computer scientist, IT leader and educationalist. He is best known as the architect of India's national initiative in supercomputing where he led the development of Param supercomputers. He is a Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan, and Maharashtra Bhushan awardee. Indian computer magazine Dataquest placed him among the pioneers of India's IT industry. He was the founder and executive director of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and is currently working on developing exascale supercomputing for India.
Go to Profile#6170
Klaus Krippendorff
#6179
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Klaus Krippendorff was a communication scholar, social science methodologist, and cyberneticist. and was the Gregory Bateson professor for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. He wrote an influential textbook on content analysis and is the creator of the widely used and eponymous measure of interrater reliability, Krippendorff's alpha. In 1984–1985, he served as the president of the International Communication Association, one of the two largest professional associations for scholars for communication.
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Fouad Ajami
#6180
Overall Influence
1945 - 2014 (69 years)
Fouad A. Ajami was a Lebanese-born American university professor and writer on Middle Eastern issues. He was a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Ajami was an outspoken supporter of the Bush Doctrine and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which he believed to have been a "noble war" and a "gift" to the people of Iraq.
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Lov Grover
#6181
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Lov Kumar Grover is an Indian-American computer scientist. He is the originator of the Grover database search algorithm used in quantum computing. Grover's 1996 algorithm won renown as the second major algorithm proposed for quantum computing , and in 2017 was finally implemented in a scalable physical quantum system. Grover's algorithm has been the subject of numerous popular science articles.
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Natalie Zemon Davis
#6182
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Natalie Zemon Davis, was an American-Canadian historian of the early modern period. She was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University. Her work originally focused on France, but it later broadened to include other parts of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. For example, her book, Trickster Travels , views Italy, Spain, Morocco and other parts of North Africa and West Africa through the lens of Leo Africanus's pioneering geography. Davis' books have all been translated into other languages: twenty-two for The Return of Martin Guerre. She was the second female ...
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Joann Sfar
#6183
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Joann Sfar is a French comics artist, comic book creator, novelist, and film director. Life and career Sfar was born in Nice, the son of Lilou, a pop singer, who died when he was three, and André Sfar, a lawyer well known for prosecuting Neo-Nazis. As a result of his mother's early death, Sfar was raised by his father and maternal grandfather, a military doctor of Ukrainian origin in the Alsace-Lorraine Independent Brigade during World War II. Sfar's grandfather reportedly saved the right hand of the brigade's leader, novelist André Malraux, for which he was awarded French citizenship.
Go to Profile#6175
Peter Ladefoged
#6184
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Peter Nielsen Ladefoged was a British linguist and phonetician. He was Professor of Phonetics at University of California, Los Angeles , where he taught from 1962 to 1991. His book A Course in Phonetics is a common introductory text in phonetics, and The Sounds of the World's Languages is widely regarded as a standard phonetics reference. Ladefoged also wrote several books on the phonetics of African languages. Prior to UCLA, he was a lecturer at the universities of Edinburgh, Scotland and Ibadan, Nigeria .
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Maurizio Cattelan
#6185
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian visual artist. Known primarily for his hyperrealistic sculptures and installations, Cattelan's practice also includes curating and publishing. His satirical approach to art has resulted in him being frequently labelled as a joker or prankster of the art world. Self-taught as an artist, Cattelan has exhibited internationally in museums and Biennials.
Go to Profile#6177
Michael Burrows
#6186
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Michael Burrows, FRS is a British computer scientist and the creator of the Burrows–Wheeler transform, currently working for Google. Born in Britain, as of 2018 he lives in the United States, although he remains a British citizen.
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Gordon H. Bower
#6187
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Gordon Howard Bower was a cognitive psychologist studying human memory, language comprehension, emotion, and behavior modification. He received his Ph.D. in learning theory from Yale University in 1959. He held the A. R. Lang Emeritus Professorship at Stanford University. In addition to his research, Bower also was a notable adviser to numerous students, including John R. Anderson, Lawrence W. Barsalou, Lera Boroditsky, Keith Holyoak, Stephen Kosslyn, Alan Lesgold, Mark A. Gluck, and Robert Sternberg, among others.
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David Ives
#6188
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David Ives is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. He is perhaps best known for his comic one-act plays; The New York Times in 1997 referred to him as the "maestro of the short form". Ives has also written dramatic plays, narrative stories, and screenplays, has adapted French 17th and 18th-century classical comedies, and adapted 33 musicals for New York City's Encores! series.
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Corey Robin
#6189
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Corey Robin is an American political theorist, journalist and professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written books on the role of fear in political life, tracing its presence from Aristotle through the war on terror, and on the nature of conservatism in the modern world, from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Most recently, he is the author of a study of Justice Clarence Thomas that argues that the mainspring of Thomas's jurisprudence is a combination of black nationalism and black conservatism.
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Samuel Weber
#6190
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Samuel M. Weber is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, as well as a professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Weber began PhD studies at Yale University. Partly through correspondence with Herbert Marcuse he became interested in emerging German and French theoretical debates. He later transferred to Cornell University where he wrote a dissertation under the tutelage of Paul de Man. Weber co-translated the first English-language collection of essays by German philosopher Theodor Adorno. Since that time he has held professorships ...
Go to Profile#6182
Evo Morales
#6191
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Juan Evo Morales Ayma is a Bolivian politician, trade union organizer, and former cocalero activist who served as the 65th president of Bolivia from 2006 to 2019. Widely regarded as the country's first president to come from its indigenous population, his administration worked towards the implementation of left-wing policies, focusing on the legal protections and socioeconomic conditions of Bolivia's previously marginalized indigenous population and combating the political influence of the United States and resource-extracting multinational corporations. Ideologically a socialist, he has led ...
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Walter Russell Mead
#6192
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Walter Russell Mead is an American academic. He is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and taught American foreign policy at Yale University. He was also the editor-at-large of The American Interest magazine. Mead is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, and a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs, the quarterly foreign policy journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Go to Profile#6184
Lloyd Ohlin
#6193
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Lloyd Edgar Ohlin was an American sociologist and criminologist who taught at Harvard Law School, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago over his career where he studied the causes and effects of crime and punishment, especially as it related to youthful offenders and delinquents.
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Margherita Hack
#6194
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
Margherita Hack was an Italian astrophysicist and scientific disseminator. The asteroid 8558 Hack, discovered in 1995, was named in her honour. Biography Hack was born in Florence. Her father Roberto Hack was a Florentine bookkeeper of Protestant Swiss origin. Her mother, Maria Luisa Poggesi, a Catholic from Tuscany, was a graduate of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze and a miniaturist at the Uffizi Gallery. Both parents left their religion to join the Italian Theosophical Society, for which Roberto Hack was secretary for a time under the chairmanship of the countess Gamberini-Cavallini...
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Paul Q. Kolderie
#6195
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Paul Q. Kolderie is an American record producer, engineer, and mixer. He has worked with Pixies, Radiohead, Orangutang, Hole, Dinosaur Jr., Juliana Hatfield, Wax, Warren Zevon, Uncle Tupelo, Throwing Muses, Morphine, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Abandoned Pools, the Go-Go's, and Mike Gordon of Phish. He usually works with production partner Sean Slade.
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M. S. Bartlett
#6196
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Maurice Stevenson Bartlett FRS was an English statistician who made particular contributions to the analysis of data with spatial and temporal patterns. He is also known for his work in the theory of statistical inference and in multivariate analysis.
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John King Fairbank
#6197
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
John King Fairbank was an American historian of China and United States–China relations. He taught at Harvard University from 1936 until his retirement in 1977. He is credited with building the field of China studies in the United States after World War II with his organizational ability, his mentorship of students, support of fellow scholars, and formulation of basic concepts to be tested.
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John E. Sarno
#6198
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
John Ernest Sarno Jr. was Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, New York University School of Medicine, and attending physician at the Howard A. Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, New York University Medical Center. He graduated from Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1943, and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1950. In 1965, he was appointed the director of the Outpatient Department at the Rusk Institute.
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Vince Foster
#6199
Overall Influence
1945 - 1993 (48 years)
Vincent Walker Foster Jr. was an American attorney who served as deputy White House counsel during the first six months of the Clinton administration. Foster had been a partner at Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, where, as The Washington Post later wrote, he rose to "the pinnacle of the Arkansas legal establishment." At the White House, he was unhappy with work in politics and spiraled into depression, and in July 1993, he was found dead of a gunshot wound in Fort Marcy Park. Five official governmental investigations ruled his death a suicide, but several conspiracy theories emerged.
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Kevin Garnett
#6200
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Kevin Maurice Garnett is an American former professional basketball player who played for 21 seasons in the National Basketball Association . Nicknamed KG by his initials, and the "Big Ticket" for his emphatic dunking and athleticism, Garnett is considered one of the greatest power forwards of all time, being known for his intensity, defensive ability, and versatility. As of 2020, he is one of five NBA players to have won both the NBA Most Valuable Player Award and the NBA Defensive Player of the Year Award.
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Hiroshi Amano
#6201
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Hiroshi Amano is a Japanese physicist, engineer and inventor specializing in the field of semiconductor technology. For his work he was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Isamu Akasaki and Shuji Nakamura for "the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources".
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David Karger
#6202
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
David Ron Karger is an American computer scientist who is professor and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Education Karger received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.
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Mitchel Resnick
#6203
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mitchel Resnick is LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research, Director of the Okawa Center, and Director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. , Resnick serves as head of the Media Arts and Sciences academic program, which grants master's degrees and Ph.D.s at the MIT Media Lab.
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Germaine Tillion
#6204
Overall Influence
1907 - 2008 (101 years)
Germaine Tillion was a French ethnologist, best known for her work in Algeria in the 1950s on behalf of the French government. A member of the French resistance, she spent time in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
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Hiroshi Aramata
#6205
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Hiroshi Aramata is a Japanese author, polymath, critic, translator and specialist in natural history, iconography and cartography. His most popular novel was Teito Monogatari , which has sold over 5 million copies in Japan alone.
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Terry Bradshaw
#6206
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Terry Paxton Bradshaw is an American former professional football player who was a quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the National Football League . Since 1994, he has been a television sports analyst and co-host of Fox NFL Sunday. Bradshaw is also an actor and recording artist, having participated in several television shows and films, most notably co-starring in the movie Failure to Launch, and releasing several country music albums. He played for 14 seasons with Pittsburgh, won four Super Bowl titles in a six-year period , becoming the first quarterback to win three and four Super Bowls, and led the Steelers to eight AFC Central championships.
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Aaron Sloman
#6207
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Aaron Sloman is a philosopher and researcher on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He held the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, and before that a chair with the same title at the University of Sussex. Since retiring he is Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at Birmingham. He has published widely on philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence; he also collaborated widely, e.g. with biologist Jackie Chappell on the evolut...
Go to Profile#6199
Steve Bruce
#6208
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Stephen Roger Bruce is an English professional football manager and former player who played as a centre-back. He most recently managed West Bromwich Albion. Born in Corbridge, Northumberland, he was a promising schoolboy footballer but was rejected by several professional clubs. He was on the verge of quitting the game altogether when he was offered a trial with Gillingham. Bruce was offered an apprenticeship and went on to play more than 200 games for the club before joining Norwich City in 1984, winning the League Cup in 1985. In 1987, he moved to Manchester United, with whom he achieved g...
Go to Profile#6200
Keith Jenkins
#6209
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Keith Jenkins is a British historiographer. Jenkins studied medieval and modern history as well as political theory at The University of Nottingham. Like Hayden White and "postmodern" historiographers, Jenkins believes that any historian's output should be seen as a story. A work of history is as much about the historian's own world view and ideological positions as it is about past events. This means that different historians will inevitably ascribe different meanings to the same historical events. Nevertheless, all historians are constrained by the common body of historical evidence .
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