Quick questions on Who are historians for HSC History Extension

For much of the medieval period the historian's authority rested on a providential framework. Writers such as the Venerable Bede, author of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, understood the past as the unfolding of a divine plan, and the historian's task was to read events as signs of God's purpose. Authority came from faith and from the institution of the Church as much as from evidence. The Renaissance and Enlightenment shifted the ground again.

The decisive transformation came in the nineteenth century with the German scholar Leopold von Ranke, who is usually credited with founding history as a professional academic discipline. Ranke insisted the historian's duty was to show the past wie es eigentlich gewesen, as it essentially was, through the rigorous, critical study of primary archival documents. He institutionalised the seminar, source criticism and the footnote. With Ranke the historian became a trained professional, certified by a university, whose authority rested on archival mastery rather than birth, faith or eloquence.

The twentieth century then widened who could be a historian. The French Annales school, led by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre and later Fernand Braudel, expanded the historian's remit beyond politics and great men to geography, climate, mentalities and the longue duree. Marxist historians such as E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class, insisted on recovering the experience of ordinary people, history from below.

The argumentative pay-off is this: every definition of who the historian is encodes a claim about what counts as legitimate knowledge of the past. Herodotus trusted inquiry and testimony, Bede trusted revelation, Ranke trusted the archive, Thompson trusted the recovered voice of the worker. When you write about who historians are, name the figure, name the basis of their authority, and name the context that produced it. That sequence turns a list into an argument about the constructed, contested nature of the historian's role.