Ranke wanted history told as it really happened, straight from the archives
Leopold von Ranke transformed history from polished storytelling into evidence-based research. He trained students in seminars, sent them into newly opened archives, and demanded they judge every source. His motto, telling the past as it actually was, made him a founder of modern historical scholarship, though a devout Lutheran faith coloured his conclusions.
Ranke was born in 1795 in Wiehe, in the Electorate of Saxony, into a family of Lutheran pastors and lawyers, and schooled partly at Schulpforta. At Leipzig he studied classics and theology and became an expert translator of ancient authors. He admired Thucydides and Livy but found modern history books tedious, mere heaps of facts.
While teaching classics at a school in Frankfurt an der Oder from 1817 to 1825, he turned to history, hoping both to help professionalise it and to trace the hand of God in events. His 1824 book on Latin and Germanic peoples between 1494 and 1514 drew on an unusual range of material: memoirs, diaries, letters, government papers, diplomatic dispatches and eyewitness accounts. The education minister was impressed that he had managed this without access to major libraries, and Ranke was given a post at the University of Berlin, where he taught for nearly fifty years.
In Berlin he sided with the legal scholar Friedrich Carl von Savigny, who stressed the distinctness of each period, against Hegel's picture of history as one universal story. He was the first historian to work through the 47 volumes of Venice's 16th- and 17th-century diplomatic archives, access smoothed in Vienna by Friedrich von Gentz and Metternich. Using material supplied by Vuk Karadžić, an eyewitness, he also wrote a short history of the Serbian revolution of 1804.
Building on the Göttingen school, he set up the first historical seminar and championed primary sources, narrative and international politics. Critics note that his belief in God acting through history shaped his view of the German Empire as divinely intended. He was ennobled in 1865 and died in 1886.
Source: Leopold von Ranke
