Students examine who historians are, the contexts in which they have worked, and how the identity, authority and purpose of the historian have changed over time

What this dot point is asking

The first of the NESA key questions in Constructing History is deceptively simple: who are historians? The dot point does not want a list of famous names. It wants you to argue that the very category of historian is historically constructed, that who is permitted to write authoritative history, on what authority, and for what audience, has changed dramatically across time. To answer it well you must move from antiquity to the present, naming figures and their contexts, and show that the historian is a role shaped by the society that produces it rather than a fixed, neutral observer standing outside the past.

The answer

A historian is anyone who systematically inquires into the past and produces an account of it for others, but the kind of person who has held that authority, and the basis of that authority, has shifted repeatedly. In the ancient Greek world Herodotus, often called the father of history, derived his standing from travel, eyewitness inquiry and the reporting of competing accounts. His Greek word historia means inquiry, and that emphasis on investigation distinguished him from the poets and myth-makers who preceded him. Thucydides, writing on the Peloponnesian War, narrowed authority further: he claimed reliability from his own contemporaneity, his political and military experience, and his refusal to include the marvellous. Between them the two Greeks established a tension that still defines the field, between the wide-ranging inquirer and the rigorous, evidence-bound analyst.

Authority from divine order to the archive

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. Humanists recovered classical models, and writers such as Edward Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, combined narrative grandeur with a critical, sceptical attitude to sources and a willingness to explain change through human and material causes rather than providence.

The professional historian

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. This professional model dominated the twentieth century and still underpins the academy.

Widening the circle

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. Feminist historians, social historians and historians of empire challenged the assumption that authoritative history was written by, and about, elite Western men. In the present, public historians, museum curators, documentary makers, Indigenous knowledge-holders and digital archivists all lay claim to the historian's work, fragmenting the singular professional authority Ranke had built.

Using this in an answer

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.