Viewed over time, and looking at people who were considered pre-eminent historians is being considered a “great” historian more weighted toward those who bring new research to the table, or toward those who are masterful writers & story tellers?
The historians that I like, who are acknowledged as great, tend to be good writers, as well as good thinkers. For example, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr took an entirely new approach to history, focusing on the ordinary people and how they were affected by, and affected history. Robert Wiebe’s The Search for Order is well-written, extremely well-researched, and develops a compelling thesis. Arthur Schlesinger Jr similarly took a novel approach to the Age of Jackson. He’s best known for the Roosevelt series, which is very well written, but doesn’t really cohere around his thesis, and doesn’t do much of what he originally laid out. It’s still one of my favorite books, though. Kathy Piess, on the other hand, has excellent insights, a novel approach, thoroughgoing research, but is dry as dust and half as tasty. Cheap Amusements is a great book that should be skimmed and skip-read by anyone with an interest in women’s history or the Progressive Era.
So I guess the historians who can write eventually surpass the ones who can’t, despite any other qualifications.
Good question, but one I don’t think it’s easy to answer. I’d lean towards writing ability, but not just in the sense of being able to write well. A great historian is great by being able to bring together vasts amounts of data and arrange it in such a way that makes for compelling reading.
I think one way to judge the greatness of a historian is if they are able to bring together a vast amount of data and arrange it in such a way as to change the way others think or see things. Either in bringing clarity to something where clarity wasn’t present before (or was needed), or bringing a new or fresh perspective on a given topic.
Research is important, but I personally think it’s the way the research is presented that makes the difference.
Who would you consider to be a great historian? By my criteria above, one example I can think of is Ferdinand Braudel.
Great historians are both.
Good historians are generally better with the research than the writing. The get some good insights, but the prose defeats them.
Mediocre historians are better with the writing than the researsh. They might be popular, but eventually that fades.
Poor historians are good at neither.
I would have thought it would be “deduction” that decided a great historian? There might be a better word for it, but I’m rather disturbed (even though I know nothing of the profession) that nothing in that vein has been mentioned.
Damn Eponymous, that is EXACTLY who I was thinking of while I was opening this thread. Good answer by the way :).
- Tamerlane
Thanks, Tamerlane - with your background in history, the compliment is much appreciated. 
Threads like this, as is already apparent here, often turn into “My favorite historian…” threads. This is, i think, somewhat inevitable, given the very different criteria that people use to determine what makes a good historian.
Also, i think the OP left too large a gap. There are plenty of historians who perhaps fall short of being “great,” but who are also well above mediocre. Many excellent historians are probably people that the general reading public has never heard of. They are often people who write outstanding books and articles, and who advance knowledge within their field, but do so in works that are not necessarily written for a general audience.
My dissertation adviser is, i believe, an excellent historian. She has written articles that most people who study American history would recognize, and the most important of her books is required reading for anyone who works in her particular field of history. It’s a massive book, one that took over a decade to write and that is, in many ways, the premier authority on its topic.
But there’s no way in the world that i would suggest her book to someone who asked me to “Recommend a good history book to read over the vacation.” The book was written for a rather specialized audience, and was never really intended—either by its author or its publisher—as a popular work.
Some people tend to deride works such as this, calling them narrow and “merely” academic. But it is works like this that often help form the basis for the work of other historians, many of whom do use their knowledge to write more widely-accessible books.
The example of Braudel, given above, also demonstrates another question of how one assigns the term “great.” Personally, i agree that Braudel was a great historian. He was also a historian whose work has been built upon and, in many ways, superceded. And he was flat out wrong about some things. But none of this lessen his greatness. He taught historians to think in new ways, and his influence lives on even though some of his ideas have been pushed aside or altered to fit new understandings of history. There is something great about changing the way that others think about the fundamental nature of a discipline, even if you are sometimes shown to be wrong or misguided. As historian Richard Hofstadter once said (i’m quoting from memory here, so it may not be perfect), “If a new or heterodox idea deserves anything, it deserves a forceful overstatement.”
One poster above mentioned Robert Weibe. I agree about The Search for Order. It’s a great book, still an essential work on its topic, and as a twentieth century Americanist i have a copy on my shelf. Does one great work, though, make a great historian? Does the term “great,” as used by the OP, necessitate more than just one shining light? Does it require an oeuvre that shows depth and range? I’m not sure about this. After all, if The Making of the English Working Class was the only thing he ever wrote, i would still consider Edward Thompson a great historian. The fact that he made other contributions just helps to show how great he really was.
For me, in many ways, what makes a great historian is a facility for synthesis. In some ways, i guess i’m echoing eponymous a little here, in that by synthesis i mean the ability to put together a whole bunch of disparate information and ideas and present them in new ways, in ways that fundamentally change how we think about the past.
Let’s face it, research itself is not the biggest hurdle. Research is, for the most part, hours of drudgery rewarded by nuggets of important discovery and moments of exhilaration. Most people can, with some training and practice, learn how to do research.
While not everyone can be a great writer, not every great writer will be a great historian. Stephen Ambrose knew how to spin a great story, but his historical work was, in my opinion, rather uninspired and uninspiring in many ways. I don’t want to bash him, nor do i think that his work was bad; it just didn’t do the sort of things that great history does. Not for me, anyway. Of course, pretty soon someone will be here to assert that he was, in fact, a great historian, which will again demonstrate how the criteria differ for each of us.
A large enough body of research can set a standard all by itself. Many people disagree with Robert Caro’s conclusions but nobody will ever write another book on Lyndon Johnson or Robert Moses without referring back to Caro’s work.
I agree. For lack of a better term, I’d call it a viewpoint. A great historian takes facts that were already known but essentially says “now look at them this way.” Arnold Toynbee didn’t tell anybody anything new about various civilizations (and nobody is calling Toynbee’s work light reading) but his theory that all of them could be fit into a common pattern was new.