Historically, who was the best historian in the history of history?

[civverguy]

Sima Qian. Recording 2000 years of Chinese history is very difficult.

 

[sydhe]

Sima Qian. Recording 2000 years of Chinese history is very difficult.

I think you may be right. He's also one of the few Chinese historians read in the west, unless you count semi-fictionalized history like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

There was another Chinese historian who wrote The Book of Strategems (as in methods of outwitting your enemy). Our library here had a copy of a translation of the first half that was excellent reading. The volume has unfortunately disappeared and I don't know if the second half was ever trans;ated.

 

[RomanCowboy]

marcellinius at least that's how i think you spell it...

because he not only wrote of the winss of rome he put the bloody defeats. But then agin their was the huns having coats made of mice thing.....

 

[ParkCungHee]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Gibbon yet. In the very least he is our greatest historian named after an ape.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

No, the great Roman Orangutanius was greater . . .

 

[ParkCungHee]

True that, an Orangutan is a great ape, Gibbons are just mediocre apes.

 

[HypnosTene]

For lasting influence I'd put Thucydides as the most influential.

He is very much part of the reason that so much of our recorded history myopically focuses on war and a fairly limited view of diplomacy and politics. That, and the fact he formulated "acribeia", acriby, his "painful thoroughness" in sifting and comparing sources.

My thoughts exactly.

 

[Pokurcz]

The Gibbon is a "lesser ape".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbon

 

[REDY]

Thucydides was greatest.

 

[ParkCungHee]

The Gibbon is a "lesser ape".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbon

Bah, I would consider them "barely adequet apes"

 

[jeps]

Not the greatest, but Martin Gilbert is a very good modern historian.

Especially the 20th century.

 

[Maimonides]

One thing that needs to be clarified is the definition of historian. We know of many ancient writers as historians who were writing about contemporary things. Examples are:

-Herodotus wrote about his travels from Greece to Egypt. The name Palestine dates to him because he named the Levant after the Phillistines he encountered.
-Josephus wrote about a Jewish revolt against Roman rule that he participated in.

Both are thought of today as historians, but their works were mostly contemporary. Modern historians are people who study & write about the past.

If ancients like Herodotus & Josephus are considered historians here, then Josephus has to be on the list. He is the earliest, non Biblical reference to Jesus that I know of & much of what we know about the Jewish revolt of 66-70 CE comes from him.

I also really like Cornelius Ryan's account of D-Day, The Longest Day.

 

[Verbose]

Modern historians are people who study & write about the past.

If ancients like Herodotus & Josephus are considered historians here, then Josephus has to be on the list. He is the earliest, non Biblical reference to Jesus that I know of & much of what we know about the Jewish revolt of 66-70 CE comes from him.

There's contemporary history written by historians as well.

Herodotus wrote about things happening about a generation ago. Already he had trouble with the documentation. All ancient historians struggled with lack of sources. That was why Tucydided decied to write about this war he had been a part of, but sidelined from (no fault of his own), as events unfolded.

One of the things that was so novel about him was that he explicitly wrote his history not for the consumption of his contemporaries, but for posterity. That's also something modern historians have picked up from him; trying to write works that might actually have some staying power. (Though rifling through stacks of modern PhD dissertations gives the impression that ambition might have been lost.)

 

[Pangur Bán]

Turgot and Schlöser might share credit for formulating the concept of (universal) "world history" also back in the late 18th c.

This, of course, is complete nonsense. The formulation of universal world history predates the ancient Greek storytellers the West likes to regard as its first "historians". If you doubt that, read genesis and you'll see universal world history fully formulated! Obviously you are referring to something else, but I can't find any twisted way to give either of these guys any version of this honour. You'll need to elaborate on this one.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Well?

Who was the best historian ever and why?

Love always,

Fifty Q Fiftyson

PS: I don't care if "best" is ambiguous. DEAL WITH IT!!!​

I'm afraid the answer you seek is nowhere. There is no-one on this planet who has or ever will read even a large proportion of all the historians who've ever written. Therefore, even ignoring the inherent subjectivity of the question, no-one will ever be able to give you a reasonable "why". The only way most people can and will answer will be to select one historian from the small section of the small historical body of historians they've been brought up to believe are canonical; i.e. a small range of Greek, Latin and modern western historians, with the more culturally sensitive bringing into consideration a few Islamic or Far Eastern historians prominent in the West.

A much more reasonable way to ask your question would be either "which historian that you have read have you enjoyed the most" or "which historian do you judge to best that you've read as a historian", in either a time relative perspective (i.e. the older the less rigorous the judgment) or absolutely.

For the first one, Peter Brown is very much one of the best academic historians as a writer; but for instance, I'd include among the other of the most fun "historians" I've ever read Bernal Diaz, William of Rubruck or Xenophon (his Anabasis); their funness derives here very much from the story and the way they recount it. For modern academic historians, the funness I find generally derives from their skill as a writer and their originality (blown if the historian is obviously incompetent). Peter Brown is a very skilled writer, and can be highly original sometimes.

For actual historical skill; my answer would be to list a few of those people called "microhistorians"; writings about subjects where the historian really has mastered all or virtually all of the material available to him. The problem with the kind of history most people read is that the more general the history is, the more incompetent the historian is likely to be on specific points. And indeed, it is highly impossible to write great general histories without this. The best that the writers of the latter can do is trust the best more specific sytheses of even more specific microhistories, and go on from there. Some more general historians do this well, e.g. Norman Davies, but even the best are always going to be crap sources for more specific information.

As for general historical theorists who many here are likely to identify as the best historian: there are a bunch every generation. Each one has moved historiography forward in his own way, or been more or less original. Quite impossible to pick one as "the best". Since virtually all of these guys over-generalize and haven't learned to shut the f*** up about topics they are not competent to talk about, each one is highly imperfect.

 

[Verbose]

This, of course, is complete nonsense. The formulation of universal world history predates the ancient Greek storytellers the West likes to regard as its first "historians". If you doubt that, read genesis and you'll see universal world history fully formulated! Obviously you are referring to something else, but I can't find any twisted way to give either of these guys any version of this honour. You'll need to elaborate on this one.

You get a Christian linear universal history which serves the West quite well, until about the 16th c. Hard to pin it on a single historian though. (Even if I find Gioacchino da Fiore interesting; his 12th c. world history based on the successive ages of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost was deemed heretical by the Papacy.) Then it starts to work less well when presented with the task of explaining things like the New World etc.

What one then gets with enlightenment historians like Turgot, or Condorcet, or Schlözer, are formulations of a project of a secular world history now encompassing all those parts of the world that the ancient never knew about. And I mean it pretty literally as in Turgot consciously talking about trying to write a "histoire universelle" and Schlözer about "Universalgeschichte". And it's a matter of impact as well, getting others o carry on in the same vein. (Otherwise I'd include Vico as well, but his impact was a bit more delayed iirc.)
I also rate Schlözer higher than for instance Ranke not just because he predated him, but had a conception of how to write world history including ethnography and statistics, while Ranke worked very hard to define history in such a fashion as to be able to exclude most non-Europeans and pretty much base it on official diplomatic records and the doings of statesmen. Schlözer's stuff was continued in German "Göttingen-statistics" and by the German "Kulturgeschichte" movement in the 1840's instead.

So it was that kind of modern project of world history (universal but secular) I was after, and makes for a bit of difference when compared to the older versions, to elaborate a bit.

Of course I'm no historian in the vein of political history started by Ranke. That might have something to do with my predelictions here.

 

[soul_warrior]

thank you all for not including Barbara Tuchman.
she writes a great story, and even makes a nice argument, but no historian is she!

i think that the best historians over all are the ones to write the bible.
they cover a large portion of time,
they deal with a limited area,
they are not partial, but none are.
they tell a darn good story, and people still read it and swear by it.

pretty fly for a few white guys, no?

 

[Maimonides]

thank you all for not including Barbara Tuchman.
she writes a great story, and even makes a nice argument, but no historian is she!

Can't include someone I've never heard of.

i think that the best historians over all are the ones to write the bible.
they cover a large portion of time,
they deal with a limited area,
they are not partial, but none are.
they tell a darn good story, and people still read it and swear by it.

It's definitely hugely influential & an interesting read, but it's hard to call history in many cases. Some of the events & names are corroborated by archaeology & other sources, but lots of it requires faith which is why it's thought of as a religious work, not a historical one.

pretty fly for a few white guys, no?

They were definitely not "white."

 

[Lord Dom]

i do not believe in anyone as a great historian, i believe the only great historian in the world is the person who records the time, and has a simple description with no bias. unfortunatley we and all historians are bias just from picking what event to record and what point to support. howard zinn said that people are bias just from the imformation they share. even if we "think" a historians recording is obsurde we still are bias in not listening to his recording, and he's bias for not listening to ours. so i have to say in my book to qualify for greatest you must totally be unbiased, and to me such a thing does not exist.

 

[soul_warrior]

i do not believe in anyone as a great historian, i believe the only great historian in the world is the person who records the time, and has a simple description with no bias. unfortunatley we and all historians are bias just from picking what event to record and what point to support. howard zinn said that people are bias just from the imformation they share. even if we "think" a historians recording is obsurde we still are bias in not listening to his recording, and he's bias for not listening to ours. so i have to say in my book to qualify for greatest you must totally be unbiased, and to me such a thing does not exist.

that was the longest unBIASED sentence i have ever read