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The Most Famous

HISTORIANS from United States

This page contains a list of the greatest American Historians. The pantheon dataset contains 339 Historians, 45 of which were born in United States. This makes United States the birth place of the 4th most number of Historians behind Germany and France.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary American Historians of all time. This list of famous American Historians is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of American Historians.

1. Thomas Kuhn (1922 - 1996)

With an HPI of 73.55, Thomas Kuhn is the most famous American Historian. His biography has been translated into 67 different languages on wikipedia.

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) 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. Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity" alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants.

2. Jared Diamond (1937 - )

With an HPI of 65.30, Jared Diamond is the 2nd most famous American Historian. His biography has been translated into 48 different languages.

Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist, historian, and author. In 1985 he received a MacArthur Genius Grant, and he has written hundreds of scientific and popular articles and books. His best known is Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which received multiple awards including the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. He has over 50 articles published in the scientific journal Nature, as well as a similar number in the popular magazine Discover. In 2005, Diamond was ranked ninth on a poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy of the world's top 100 public intellectuals. Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology, Diamond is commonly referred to as a polymath, stemming from his knowledge in many fields including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Science, an honor bestowed by the President of the United States and the National Science Foundation. As of 2024, he is a professor of geography at UCLA.

3. Donna Haraway (1944 - )

With an HPI of 60.58, Donna Haraway is the 3rd most famous American Historian. Her biography has been translated into 30 different languages.

Donna J. Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics. Haraway has taught women's studies and the history of science at the University of Hawaii (1971-1974) and Johns Hopkins University (1974-1980). She began working as a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1980 where she became the first tenured professor in feminist theory in the United States. Haraway's works have contributed to the study of both human–machine and human–animal relations. Her work has sparked debate in primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway participated in a collaborative exchange with the feminist theorist Lynn Randolph from 1990 to 1996. Their engagement with specific ideas relating to feminism, technoscience, political consciousness, and other social issues, formed the images and narrative of Haraway's book Modest_Witness for which she received the Society for Social Studies of Science's (4S) Ludwik Fleck Prize in 1999. She was also awarded the Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology's Robert K. Merton award in 1992 for her work Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. In 2017, Haraway was awarded the Wilbur Cross Medal, one of the highest honors for alumni of Yale University.

4. Barbara W. Tuchman (1912 - 1989)

With an HPI of 58.53, Barbara W. Tuchman is the 4th most famous American Historian. Her biography has been translated into 39 different languages.

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (; January 30, 1912 – February 6, 1989) was an American historian, journalist and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August (1962), a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), a biography of General Joseph Stilwell. Tuchman focused on writing popular history.

5. Hayden White (1928 - 2018)

With an HPI of 57.72, Hayden White is the 5th most famous American Historian. His biography has been translated into 30 different languages.

Hayden V. White (July 12, 1928 – March 5, 2018) was an American historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973/2014).

6. Richard Sennett (1943 - )

With an HPI of 56.42, Richard Sennett is the 6th most famous American Historian. His biography has been translated into 23 different languages.

Richard Sennett (born 1 January 1943) is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. Sennett has studied social ties in cities, and the effects of urban living on individuals in the modern world. He has been a Fellow of The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

7. Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010)

With an HPI of 55.04, Howard Zinn is the 7th most famous American Historian. His biography has been translated into 44 different languages.

Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010) 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. Zinn described himself as "something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist." He wrote extensively about the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and labor history of the United States. His memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon Press, 1994), was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn's life and work. Zinn died of a heart attack in 2010, at age 87.

8. Linda Nochlin (1931 - 2017)

With an HPI of 54.11, Linda Nochlin is the 8th most famous American Historian. Her biography has been translated into 23 different languages.

Linda Nochlin (née Weinberg; January 30, 1931 – October 29, 2017) was an American art historian, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor Emerita of Modern Art at New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and writer. As a prominent feminist art historian, she became well known for her pioneering 1971 article "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" published by ARTnews.

9. Deborah Lipstadt (1947 - )

With an HPI of 53.76, Deborah Lipstadt is the 9th most famous American Historian. Her biography has been translated into 23 different languages.

Deborah Esther Lipstadt (born March 18, 1947) is an American historian and diplomat, best known as author of the books Denying the Holocaust (1993), History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005), The Eichmann Trial (2011), and Antisemitism: Here and Now (2019). She has served as the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism since May 3, 2022. Since 1993 she has been the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US.Lipstadt was a consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 1994, President of the United States Bill Clinton appointed her to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, and she served two terms. On July 30, 2021, President Joe Biden nominated her to be the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism. She was confirmed by voice-vote on March 30, 2022, and sworn in on May 3, 2022. Lipstadt was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

10. Frederick Jackson Turner (1861 - 1932)

With an HPI of 52.60, Frederick Jackson Turner is the 10th most famous American Historian. His biography has been translated into 35 different languages.

Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861 – March 14, 1932) was an American historian during the early 20th century, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until 1910, and then Harvard University. He was known primarily for his frontier thesis. He trained many PhDs who went on to become well-known historians. He promoted interdisciplinary and quantitative methods, often with an emphasis on the Midwestern United States. Turner's essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" included ideas that formed the frontier thesis. In it, Turner argued that the moving western frontier exerted a strong influence on American democracy and the American character from the colonial era until 1890. He is also known for his theories of geographical sectionalism. During recent years historians and academics have argued frequently over Turner's work; however, all agree that the frontier thesis has had an enormous effect on historical scholarship.

People

Pantheon has 45 people classified as historians born between 1796 and 1969. Of these 45, 16 (35.56%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living historians include Jared Diamond, Donna Haraway, and Richard Sennett. The most famous deceased historians include Thomas Kuhn, Barbara W. Tuchman, and Hayden White. As of April 2022, 15 new historians have been added to Pantheon including Robert Darnton, John King Fairbank, and Lothrop Stoddard.