Who's your favourite historian?

[Mark Young]

What do you like about Herodotos the most?
He gets quoted quite often but I haven't read him

 

[onejayhawk]

Bill James. He is a baseball historian and the preeminent figure in the field of baseball analysis. I own all his books.

J

PS Did you mean like military history (Walter Lord or Michael Sharra) or Roman history (none unless you count Luke)?

 

[andvruss]

I don't know too many, but William L. Shirier is great. He makes WW2 history page-turning with excitement (except for the New Order stuff....). He had the advantage of being in Germany when Hitler rose to power and during WW2 (Berlin).

 

[Japanrocks12]

Herodotus here too.

 

[yaroslav]

There are a lot of good historians, guys. Caesar himself, Plutarcus (biography), Tacitus, Salustitus, etc. are good examples of ancient historias. Edward Gibbon (sorry for the ortography) was a famous example some centuries ago. Today I like Hugh Thomas and Elliot, for instance

 

[Caesar Sam]

Originally posted by archer_007
The guy who wrote the History of Britain. Those were very artful books.

Simon Schama. My favorite as well, though I can't say I have read many histories.

By the way, R. Lee Ermey isn't an historian! He's an actor!

 

[Achinz]

Although he's not strictly a historian, Jared Diamond (author of "Guns, Germs and Steel") is my nomination. Through his thorough multi-disciplinary research he has been able to give a truly holistic insight into human world histroy and especially the rise of civilizations and the bases for the relative technological differences in the world today.

 

[Dr. Dr. Doktor]

Originally posted by Richard III


Me, it'd be a toss up between two Britons: Linda Colley (Britons, Captives) and Niall Ferguson (The Pity of War, Empire). Both are a rare sort in this day and age: iconoclasts who take deliberately provocative angles but actually back them up with solid primary research instead of just bulls***, speculation and theory.

Niall Ferguson He is a revisonist conservative who mostly uses secondary German litterature. At least that was my impression of Pity of War, which is largely based on Fischer and his seminal Grief nach der Weltmacht.

As for best histiorian, read Baron de Montesquieau's Spirit of the laws and be wise. Lenin is fairly good too.

 

[Richard III]

Originally posted by Dr. Dr. Doktor
Niall Ferguson He is a revisonist conservative who mostly uses secondary German litterature. At least that was my impression of Pity of War, which is largely based on Fischer and his seminal Grief nach der Weltmacht.

Re: research, I'll have to take your word on the rest for now - but just for now while I check something. But in the Pity of War, the stuff on why soldiers "liked it" is by any definition primary.

The very notion that you would make a judgement purely on whether he was a "revisionist conservative" or not is simply contemptible; Linday Colley certainly isn't conservative, and certainly IS revisionist. But she suddenly doesn't rank condemnation for her revisionism? Could it be because revisionism isn't so bad as long as it's liberal?

Like I said, what's good about both is that they are not merely whiny revisionist conspiracy theory types, spitting out the "Bush planned 09/11" or "the Romonovs are still alive" or "fighting Nazi Germany was a mistake" sort of crap that passes for revisionism these days. They take a solid and unique perspective on anything they do and argue the **** out of it. Even Ferguson's pro-imperial flag waving has a new tone, insofar as earlier jingoists were just that, but he makes more of a calculation that argues a net good rather than boistrously insisting it must have been all good or all immorally and disastrously wretched.

I don't, as a matter of fact, agree with Ferguson's perspective on most things, but to pretend he's just come out of nowhere as some sort of academic fraud just because I don't agree with where he's coming from would be, oh, a little on the unreasonable side in the full sense of the word, don't you think ?

R.III

 

[Dr. Dr. Doktor]

Re: Pity of War
Well, maybe I was a bit harsh on Ferguson. You are right that the anthropological side of the issue, why the soldiers enjoyed the fighting is based on primary sources. IIRC some from his own grandfather who fought with a scottish regiment. However the whole economic side, how England was the financially most powerful and how the Germans wanted to drag England into a fight that would erode that financial power, and what he writes about the 'limited' German war aims - that mostly comes from various secondary German litterature. There is nothing wrong with that, however since his hypothesis is that the English should never have entered the war rests on mostly secondary evidence it would be wrong to say that Ferguson only makes use of primary sources in hammering home his argument.

That aside the book is valuable if one wants to study something deeper than the usual textbooks on the subject.

 

[klazlo]

The late A.J.P. Taylor. I like his style.