Thomas Babington Macaulay

(25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859)

Thomas Babington Macaulay was an English historian and politician. His most famous historical work traced British history from 1688 to 1702.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/353722/Thomas-Babington-Macaulay-Baron-Macaulay

Macaulay’s entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

http://spartacus-educational.com/PRmacaulay.htm

Biography of Macaulay at Spartacus Educational.

Marc Bloch

(6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944)

Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was born to a Jewish family in Lyon, France. He studied at universities in Paris, Berlin, and Leipzig. He served in the infantry during the First World War, ultimately becoming a captain and receiving the National Order of the Legion of Honour. After the war, he taught at the University of Strasbourg, and then at the Sorbonne in Paris. When the Second World War broke out, Bloch again took up his position as captain in the French military. When France was defeated by Germany, Bloch joined the French Resistance. After being captured by the German secret police in 1944, Bloch was tortured and finally executed.

Bloch co-founded the Annales School with colleague Lucien Febvre in 1929. This new approach took a sweeping view of history and considered the effect of collective mentalities, an approach Bloch had previously explored in his 1924 work, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, on the popular belief in a monarch’s ability to cure scrofula through touch. In other works, Bloch examined rural French life and the impact of technology over the longue durée (the long term). During the Second World War, Bloch worked on a manuscript about the role of the historian – published posthumously in English as The Historians’ Craft –but it was left unfinished upon his death.

Important Works:

• The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (1924)
• French Rural History (1931)
• Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 (1940)
• The Historians’ Craft (1949)

Jacob Burckhardt

(25 May 1818 – 8 August 1897)

Jacob Burckhardt was a Swiss historian interested in the history of art and culture, specifically during the Italian Renaissance.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jul/10/jacob-burckhardt-civilization-renaissance-italy

An article published on the 150th anniversary of Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy

http://www.obfuchai.com/pages/jb.html

An essay on Burckhardt’s life and work.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/84952/Jacob-Burckhardt

Burckhardt’s entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Thomas Carlyle

(4 December 1795 – 5 February 1881)

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish philosopher and historian. His best-known works are his history of the French Revolution and his biography of Frederick the Great.

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carlyle/
Various resources on Carlyle.

http://spartacus-educational.com/Jcarlyle.htm
Biography of Carlyle at Spartacus Educational.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/96126/Thomas-Carlyle
Encyclopedia Britannica article on Carlyle.

Lucien Febvre

(22 July 1878 – 11 September 1956)

Lucien Febvre was a French historian who co-founded the influential Annales school with Marc Bloch.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/203280/Lucien-Paul-Victor-Febvre

Encyclopedia Britannica article on Febvre.

Michel Foucault

(15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984)

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian whose works critically examined the idea of modernity as well as questioned the formation of knowledge and its relation to power and control.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/foucault/

Foucault’s entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

Foucault’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b038hg73

A BBC4 Radio programme on Foucault’s life and work.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/17/specials/foucault-obit.html

Foucault’s obituary in The New York Times.

Edward Gibbon

(8 May (Old Style: 27 April) 1737 – 16 January 1794)

Edward Gibbon was an English historian and Member of Parliament. His masterwork was the six-volume, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/233161/Edward-Gibbon

Gibbon’s entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

http://www.edwardgibbonstudies.com/

Various resources on Gibbon.

Francesco Guicciardini

(6 March 1483 – 22 May 1540)

Francesco Guicciardini was an Italian historian during the Renaissance whose The History of Italy marked a new direction in realistic historical writing.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/248497/Francesco-Guicciardini

Guicciardini’s entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

E.J. Hobsbawm

(9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012)

Eric John Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt to a Jewish family. In his youth, Hobsbawm and his family lived in Austria and Germany, and moved to England in 1933, when Hitler came to power. He received his PhD from Cambridge University for his dissertation on the Fabian Society and, after serving in the engineer corps during the Second World War, Hobsbawm went on to work primarily at Birbeck, University of London. Hobsbawm was active in left-wing politics throughout his life, remaining a member of the Communist Party until just before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when he opted not to renew his membership.

Hobsbawm’s most famous works are his trilogy about the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) – a term he coined – and one on the short twentieth (1914-1991). His Marxist approach to history led to one of his key innovations, the idea that the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution (in Britain) should be treated as the political and economic halves of a ‘dual revolution’, making way for the rise of liberal capitalism in the nineteenth century. Hobsbawm was also a cultural critic and coined the term ‘invented traditions,’ traditional or national myths supposedly of ancient origin but actually quite recent, in his 1983 work, co-edited with T.O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.

Important Works:

• The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 (1962)
• The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975)
• The Invention of Tradition (1983, co-edited with T.O. Ranger)
• The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (1987)
• The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994)
• How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism (2011)

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/14/biography.history

A profile of Hobsbawm in The Guardian.

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

(19 July 1929 –)

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is a French social historian in the tradition of the Annales School. Le  Roy Ladurie’s work examines French rural life during the ancient regime, often using the microhistory approach.

http://www.loc.gov/bicentennial/bios/frontiers/bios_ladurie.html

Biographical information from the Library of Congress.

Karl Marx

(5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883)

Karl Heinrich Marx was born in Trier, Prussia (Germany). Marx was born into a wealthy, middle-class family and attended the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin. At university, Marx became interested in G.W.F. Hegel’s theory of dialectical materialism and established himself among German radicals, most importantly Friedrich Engels. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Jena in 1841, but was unable to secure a position given his political and anti-religious views. Due to his radicalism, he was forced to leave Germany and he sought refuge in various European countries, eventually settling in England in 1849, where he continued his advocacy for communism.

Marx wrote one of his most important works, The Communist Manifesto, in 1848 in Belgium with Engels. This work laid out Marx’s theory of history as a series of class struggles, which would eventually culminate with the victory of the proletariat (working-class) and the creation of socialism. He published the first volume of his masterwork, Capital, in 1867, which further analysed and critiqued the capitalist system. The remaining two volumes would be assembled from Marx’s notes by Engels after his friend’s death.

Important works:

• The Communist Manifesto (1848)
• The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)
• Capital, Volume 1 (1867)
• Capital, Volume 2 (1885)
• Capital, Volume 3 (1894)

Sir Lewis Namier

(27 June 1888 – 19 August 1960)

Lewis Bernstein Namier was born Ludwik Niemirowski in what was then the Russian Empire, but is now in Poland, to a secular Jewish family. Namier was educated at the University of Lvov (in what is now Ukraine), the University of Lausanne (in Switzerland), the London School of Economics, and Balliol College, Oxford. He immigrated to the UK in 1907 and anglicised his name in 1913, at the same time he became a British subject. Namier fought in the First World War, but was discharged due to his poor eyesight. He continued to serve in a variety of capacities throughout the war and was a member of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. After the war, Namier taught briefly at Balliol College, and later at the University of Manchester from 1931 to 1953.

Namier’s most important work concerns his use of prosopography, or collective biography, to uncover the workings of the eighteenth-century British Parliament. By examining the biography of every Member of Parliament during that century, Namier analysed their motivations and interests to uncover that the Tory and Whig Parties were far from monolithic groups, but rather were shifting coalitions on various issues. Namier also examined wills, tax records, and memberships of various MPs to further understand their goals.

Important Works:

• The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929)
• England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930)
• 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (1946)
• Diplomatic Prelude, 1938-39 (1948)
• The House of Commons, 1754-1790 (3 volumes) (1964, co-edited with John Brooke)

Leopold von Ranke

(21 December 1795 – 23 May 1886)

Leopold von Ranke was born in Wiehe, Saxony (in modern Germany). Ranke studied theology and ancient history at the University of Leipzig. Ranke, born into a devout Lutheran family, studied history in order to see the working of God in great historical events. On the strength of his 1824 book, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514 (which contained his famous maxim to show ‘how things actually were’), and after eight years of teaching Classics at a secondary school, Ranke became a professor at the University of Berlin in 1825.

It was at Berlin where Ranke developed the seminar method of teaching and disseminated his ideas about the objective study of history through careful evaluation of primary sources. He wrote a number of multi-volume histories of large topics over long time periods, including the history of the papacy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Reformation in Germany, and his final work, a six-volume history of the world, which was left incomplete at his death. Ranke was also a conservative thinker. He wrote various works defending the established order in the German states and rejected any talk of revolution. In 1865, having won fame as the most important German historian, Ranke received the noble title of ‘von’ to his name.

Important works:

• History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514 (1824)
• History of the Popes during the 16th and 17th Centuries (1834-6)
• History of the Reformation in Germany (1839-47)
• Civil Wars and Monarchy in France (1852-61)
• World History (1886)

Simon Schama

(13 February 1945 –)

Simon Schama is an English historian who focuses on art history and European history. He has also focused on public history, most notably hosting a 15-part BBC series, A History of Britain.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Schama.html

Schama’s faculty page at the University of Columbia.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EA1842A3A1561065

Schama’s series, A History of Britain.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2014/03/21/march-21-2014-simon-schama-extended-interview/22500/

An interview with Schama on PBS.

R.H. Tawney

(30 November 1880 – 16 January 1962)

Richard Henry Tawney was born in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, then still part of the British Empire. Tawney was educated at Rugby School and then Balliol College, Oxford University, where he studied modern history. Following his graduation in 1903, Tawney lived at Toynbee Hall, a centre for social outreach to the working classes and home to the Workers’ Educational Association. Here he combined his strong Christian faith with a growing belief that simple philanthropy was inadequate and that deeper social change was required to assist the poor. As a Christian Socialist, Tawney was active in various left-wing political causes and ran three times (all unsuccessfully) for a seat in Parliament as a member of the Labour Party.

Tawney was a lecturer and later professor at the London School of Economics from 1917 until 1949, after which time he was a Professor Emeritus. His works reflected his interest in the rise of capitalism and his advocacy for social change. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, perhaps his most important work, decried how the growth of capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seemed to put the pursuit of material wealth ahead of Christian social morality. This concern is also reflected in other works, which critiqued the selfishness Tawney saw as inherent in capitalism and provided a framework for greater social equality.

Important works:

• The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912)
• The Acquisitive Society (1920)
• Secondary Education for All (1922)
• Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)   
• Equality (1931)

G. M. Trevelyan

(16 February 1876 – 21 July 1962)

George Macaulay Trevelyan was an English historian whose work examined modern British and European politics, from a self-admittedly partisan perspective.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/604447/G-M-Trevelyan

Trevelyan’s entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

http://www.historytoday.com/obituary-george-macaulay-trevelyan-1876-1962

Trevelyan’s obituary in History Today.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9416806/GM-Trevelyan-a-historian-in-tune-with-his-time-and-ours.html

A profile of Trevelyan in The Telegraph.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb

(13 July 1859 – 13 October 1947) (22 January 1858 – 30 April 1943)

Sidney and Beatrice Webb were early members of the Fabian Society and founded the London School of Economics. They were also historians of the labour movement in Britain.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1353697/Sidney-and-Beatrice-Webb

The Webbs’ entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

http://spartacus-educational.com/TUwebbS.htm

Biography of Sidney Webb at Spartacus Educational.

http://spartacus-educational.com/TUwebbB.htm

Biography of Beatrice Webb at Spartacus Educational.

http://labourlist.org/2010/11/beatrice-webb-first-among-equals/

A profile of Beatrice Webb.