Famous History Majors | Department of History

Politics and Public Life

Theodore Roosevelt (also president of the American Historical Association, 1912)
Woodrow Wilson (also president of the American Historical Association, 1924)
Franklin D. Roosevelt
John F. Kennedy
Richard Nixon
George W. Bush
Dwight Eisenhower (he wrote Crusade in Europe, a full history of WWII)
Joe Biden

W.E.B. DuBois (also one of the first Americans, and the first African-American, to earn a Ph.D. in history – from Harvard)
Henry Kissinger
Gordon Brown (Prime Minister of Great Britain)
Alexander the Great
Winston Churchill

Eric Holder (U.S. Attorney General)
Elena Kagan (first female dean of Harvard Law School, U.S. Supreme Court Justice)
Antonin Scalia (U.S. Supreme Court Justice)
Anthony M. Kennedy (U.S. Supreme Court Justice)
Sonia Sotomayor (U.S. Supreme Court Justice)

Martha Stewart
Chelsea Clinton (hedge fund manager)
Chris Hughes (co-founder of Facebook)
Donna Dubinsky (CEO of Palm, Inc.; developed the Personal Digital Assistant [PDA])
Samuel Palmisano (CEO of the IBM Corporation)
Carly Fiorina (president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard)
Howard Stringer (chairman and CEO of the Sony Corporation)
Richard B. Fisher (chairman of Morgan Stanley)
Lee Iacocca (CEO of Chrysler)
Charles Sennott (co-founder and vice president of Global News)
Ben Silverman (co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and NBC Universal Television Studio)
Robert Johnson (CEO of BET TV)
James Kilts (CEO of the Gillette Corporation)
Charles L. Hill (CEO of Veritas et Lux, president of the Boston Society of Security Analysts)
Clemson Smith Muñiz (founder and president of Smith Muñiz Productions, a Spanish-language sports media company)
Samuel J. Palmisano (Chief Executive Officer of IBM)
Jim Rogers (founder of the Quantum Fund, creator of the Rogers International Commodities Index)
Thomas M. Siebel (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at C3 AI)

Steve Carell
Sacha Baron Cohen
Conan O’Brien
Edward Norton
Sean Astin
Michael Palin (in fact, his fellow Monty Python founder, Terry Jones, has published extensively on medieval history and hosted a History Channel series on the Middle Ages)
Jimmy Buffett
Julia Child
Larry David
Brian Dennehy
Janeane Garofalo
Ellen Barkin
Katharine Hepburn
Errol Morris

Ayn Rand
Annie Proulx
Malcolm Gladwell
Gail Z. Martin
Sharon Kay Penman
Magali García Ramis
Tony Horwitz
H. G. Wells (science fiction writer who also authored the wildly popular Outline of History)
Carl Sandburg (poet and critic who also wrote the best-selling multi-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln)
David Hume (philosopher who also wrote a History of England)
Machiavelli (political philosopher who also wrote a history of Florence)
G.W.F. Hegel (philosopher who also wrote Lectures on History in the last decade of his life)
Karl Marx (political philosopher who wrote historical analyses of various European events)

Michael Hogan (President of the University of Illinois)
J. Carter Brown (Director, National Gallery of Art)
Louis R. Caplan (neurologist, physician, professor)
Robert Fogel (winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences)
Josh Sawyer (designer of role-playing video games)
Kevin Fagan (cartoonist and creator of the syndicated strip “Drabble”)
Franklin S. Odo (Director, Smithsonian Institution’s Asia Pacific American Program)
Flo Steinberg (pioneer publisher of underground comic books)
Frank Stella (painter and printmaker)
Andrew Dickson White (co-founder and first President of Cornell University)
John Milton Gregory (first President of the University of Illinois)
Drew Gilpin Faust (current President of Harvard)

Compiled by

Carol Symes, Department of History, University of Illinois

Sources

Catherine M. Burns, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Department of History, Bethel University