Historian

• 1. Introduction

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  Historians, scholars who study and write about the past, did not always constitute a recognized profession. For most of human history, the person who recorded events might be a monk, a soldier, a statesman, or a poet. It was only in the late nineteenth century that "historian" became a formal occupation, emerging out of research universities in Germany. What makes someone a legitimate historian? What separates careful scholarship from distortion? And why, after centuries of trying, has the field still never reached consensus on what objectivity even means? These are the questions that shape the story of how historians work, argue, and fail each other.

• 2. Ancient Foundations

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  Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who lived from around 484 to approximately 425 BCE, is credited by Cicero with being the father of history. His work, The Histories, stands as the earliest known piece of critical historical writing. What set Herodotus apart was his effort to distinguish between more and less reliable accounts, and he backed that effort by traveling extensively to gather information firsthand. He gave written accounts of various Mediterranean cultures and attended carefully to the actions and characters of men, though he also left room for divinity in determining how events unfolded.

  Thucydides took a sharper turn. His account of the war between Athens and Sparta largely stripped out divine causality and brought a rationalistic sensibility to historical writing, setting a precedent for what Western historians would aspire to for centuries. He was also the first writer to draw a distinction between the deep causes of an event and its immediate triggers. His successor Xenophon, who lived from around 431 to 355 BCE, pushed still further by introducing autobiographical elements and character studies in his Anabasis.

  Ancient historians worked in ways that look foreign today. Chronological systems were not widely used. Sources were frequently absorbed into the text without attribution, making it impossible to trace where ideas came from. The aim of much ancient historical writing was not to produce a neutral record but to create political or military paradigms for readers to learn from. Epics such as Homer's works were treated as historical sources and cited as such even by Thucydides. Ancient orators like Cicero described historiographical narrative as divided into three parts: history, argument, and fable.

  The Roman tradition built directly on the Greek. The Roman statesman Cato the Elder, who lived from 234 to 149 BCE, wrote the Origines in Latin rather than Greek, a deliberate choice meant to counteract Greek cultural dominance. Strabo, born in 63 BCE, combined geography with history in the Greco-Roman tradition. Livy, who lived from 59 BCE to 17 CE, traced Rome's rise from city-state to empire, and in doing so produced what appears to be the first known instance of alternate history: a speculation about what might have happened if Alexander the Great had marched against Rome.

• 3. Historians Beyond the West

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  China's Spring and Autumn Annals, the official chronicle of the State of Lu, covered events from 722 to 481 BCE and ranks among the earliest surviving Chinese historical texts arranged on annalistic principles. Sima Qian, writing around 100 BCE, is recognized as the first person in China to lay the groundwork for professional historical writing. His Shiji, known in English as Records of the Grand Historian, stretched its scope all the way back to the 16th century BCE and included not just political history but treatises on specific subjects, individual biographies of prominent figures, and accounts of the lives and deeds of ordinary people.

  The earliest chronologies anywhere trace back to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, though no historical writers in those early civilizations were known by name. Systematic historical thought as a discipline emerged independently in ancient Greece, but the impulse to understand the past appears to be a universal human need that arose across civilizations without any single point of origin.

  Muslim historical writing began developing in the seventh century, driven by the need to reconstruct the life of the Prophet Muhammad after his death. Because narratives about Muhammad and his companions conflicted, scholars had to develop methods for evaluating source reliability. They created the science of biography, the science of hadith, and the system of Isnad, which tracked the chain of transmission for any given account. Historians in this tradition included Urwah, who died in 712, Wahb ibn Munabbih, who died in 728, Ibn Ishaq, who died in 761, al-Waqidi, who lived from 745 to 822, Ibn Hisham, who died in 834, Muhammad al-Bukhari, who lived from 810 to 870, and Ibn Hajar, who lived from 1372 to 1449. These methodologies were later applied to other historical figures across Islamic civilization.

• 4. The Enlightenment Reshapes History

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  Voltaire, the French philosophe who lived from 1694 to 1778, fundamentally redirected what historians thought they were supposed to write about. In a letter from 1739, he stated plainly that his chief object was not political or military history but rather the history of arts, commerce, civilization, and the human mind. His best-known historical works are The Age of Louis XIV, published in 1751, and Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations, published in 1756. He broke from the tradition of focusing on diplomatic and military events and was the first scholar to make a serious attempt to write the history of the world while eliminating theological frameworks.

  David Hume was pursuing a parallel transformation in Britain. In 1754 he published the History of England, a six-volume work running from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. Like Voltaire, Hume expanded the frame of historical inquiry to include culture, literature, and science alongside the conventional subjects of kings, parliaments, and armies. William Robertson, a Scottish historian who also held the title of Historiographer Royal, published the History of Scotland 1542-1603 in 1759 and his most celebrated work, The History of the Reign of Charles V, in 1769. Robertson was among the first historians to recognize the importance of general and universally applicable ideas in shaping historical events.

  The Enlightenment reached what many consider its peak in historical scholarship with Edward Gibbon's six-volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published on the 17th of February 1776. The book sold impressively and earned Gibbon a total of about nine thousand pounds. Biographer Leslie Stephen wrote that after publication, Gibbon's fame was as rapid as it has been lasting. The work's relative objectivity and heavy reliance on primary sources led later observers to call Gibbon the first modern historian.

• 5. Professionalization and Its Pioneers

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  Leopold von Ranke stands at the center of how the historian's craft became a formal discipline. Working in nineteenth-century Germany, he is considered the founder of modern source-based history. Ranke implemented the seminar teaching method in his classroom and insisted that historians work from archival research and actual historical documents. His first book, the History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514, published in 1824, drew on an unusually wide range of sources, including memoirs, diaries, personal and formal letters, government documents, diplomatic dispatches, and firsthand accounts of eyewitnesses. His credo was simply to write history the way it was. Sources had to be hard evidence, not speculation.

  The professionalization process that began in Germany spread to Japan, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Russia, Scandinavia, Greece, Romania, and Latin America. Each country adapted the German model with local modifications. By the mid-nineteenth century, historical studies at universities had taken on the character of a science, with research centers reinforcing the idea that history was a rigorous empirical pursuit.

  French historian Jules Michelet coined the term Renaissance in his main work, Histoire de France, describing it as meaning "Re-birth" in French and identifying it as a period in Europe's cultural history that represented a break from the Middle Ages. The nineteen-volume work covered French history from Charlemagne to the outbreak of the Revolution. Michelet was among the first historians to shift the emphasis of historical writing from leaders and institutions toward the common people.

  Jacob Burckhardt, a Swiss historian, produced what John Lukacs later described as the work of the first master of cultural history: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860. Cultural history sought to describe the spirit and forms of expression of a particular age, people, or place, a significant departure from the political and military chronicles that had dominated the field. William Stubbs's Constitutional History of England, published in three volumes between 1874 and 1878, traced the development of the English constitution from the Teutonic invasions of Britain up to 1485, and marked what contemporaries recognized as a distinct step forward in English historical learning.

• 6. Objectivity on Trial

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  During the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial, the High Court of Justice was confronted with a problem no court had faced before: there was no legal precedent for what constituted an objective historian. The court relied on the witness report of Richard Evans, which introduced the figure of the "objective historian" in a way that echoed the traditional English legal standard of "the man on the Clapham omnibus". Justice Gray leaned heavily on Evans's research, which compared the distortion of the historical record practiced by Holocaust deniers against established historical methodologies.

  Wendie E. Schneider, writing in the Yale Law Journal, summarized Gray's judgment and distilled seven points for what the court meant by an objective historian. The historian must treat sources with appropriate reservations. The historian must not dismiss counter-evidence without scholarly consideration. The historian must be even-handed in treatment of evidence and avoid cherry-picking. The historian must clearly indicate any speculation. The historian must not mistranslate documents or mislead by omitting portions of them. The historian must weigh the authenticity of all accounts, not only those that contradict their favored view. And the historian must take the motives of historical actors into consideration.

  Schneider went further, proposing that this standard could serve as a test for determining whether a historian is suitable as an expert witness under the Daubert standard used in United States courts. Her argument was that Irving could not have passed standard Daubert tests without considerable assistance from historians. The court ultimately found that it was Irving's failure as an objective historian, not his right-wing views, that caused him to lose his libel case. A conscientious historian, in Schneider's formulation, would not have deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence to support political views.

• 7. Why Bias Is Inescapable

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  It is widely accepted within the discipline that strict objectivity is epistemologically unattainable for historians. Three reasons are commonly given. A historian's interests inevitably shape their judgment about which information to use, which to omit, and how to present it. The sources historians rely on all carry their own biases. And historians are themselves products of their culture, concepts, and beliefs. Racial and cultural biases have played major roles in national histories, which frequently ignore or downplay the roles of other groups. Gender biases operate similarly.

  Historical scholarship is never value free, since a historian's writing is shaped by the intellectual frameworks of their time. Some scholars have pointed out that fields such as religion, art, science, democracy, and social justice are by their nature what they call "essentially contested" fields, requiring diverse and field-specific tools before their topics can be interpreted at all. In practice, specific canons of historical proof are neither widely observed nor generally agreed upon among professional historians.

  One proposed remedy is transparency: historians can state their biases explicitly for their readers rather than pretending the biases do not exist. Herbert Butterfield, who coined the phrase "Whig history" in his 1931 book The Whig Interpretation of History, argued that the antidote to teleological history was a sensibility that studies the past for the sake of the past, that delights in the concrete and the complex, and that searches for the unlikenesses between past and present. Butterfield's formulation received significant attention, and the kind of historical writing he criticized is no longer academically respectable.

  The French Annales School, which radically changed historical research in France during the twentieth century, took a structural approach to the problem. Georges Duby, one of its eminent members, described his approach as relegating the sensational to the sidelines, refusing to offer simple accounting of events, and striving instead to pose and solve problems while observing the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society, and civilisation.

• 8. The Profession Today

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  In 2010, the American Historical Association released its annual job report, which found a 23.8% decline in the number of job advertisements for historians, while the number of new PhDs increased by 17%. The squeeze between supply and demand is not new. Those who finish their doctorate in the United States take on average eight or more years; funding is scarce except at a few very rich universities.

  A scholarly thesis, such as a doctoral dissertation, is now regarded as the baseline qualification for entry into the profession, though some historians still gain recognition through published academic works and fellowships awarded by bodies such as the Royal Historical Society. Publication requirements have intensified even at smaller schools, pushing graduate papers toward journal articles and PhD dissertations toward published monographs.

  A new specialty took shape in the late twentieth century: historical editing. As Edmund Morgan described its emergence in the United States, it required large sums of money but proved harder to staff with talent. Historians who undertook large editorial projects had to leave the main channel of academic life: they did not teach, did not write their own books, and did not enjoy long periods for reflection and research. Anyone who has edited historical manuscripts, Morgan observed, knows it requires as much physical and intellectual labor to prepare a text for publication as it does to write a book of one's own.

  C. Vann Woodward, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University who lived from 1908 to 1999, offered a pointed warning about what professionalization had cost the discipline. The gradual withering of the narrative impulse in favor of the analytical urge among professional academic historians, he wrote, had resulted in a virtual abdication of the oldest and most honored role of the historian: that of storyteller. Woodward cautioned his colleagues to apply the term "amateur" with care, since nonprofessionals had all but taken over narrative history and were fulfilling a function the professionals had abandoned.