List of historians

This is a list of historians.

The names are grouped by order of the historical period in which they were writing, which is not necessarily the same as the period in which they specialised.

Chroniclers and annalists, though they are not historians in the true sense, are also listed here for convenience.

Ancient historians

• Herodotus, (485—c.420 BC), Halicarnassian "Father of History"
• Thucydides, (c.460–400 BC), Peloponnesian War
• Xenophon, (431—c.360 BC), an Athenian knight and student of Socrates
• Julius Caesar, (c.100–44 BC), Gallic and civil wars
• Flavius Josephus, (37–100), Jewish history
• Sima Qian, (c.140 BC), Chinese history
• Plutarch, (c. 46–120 AD)
• Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, (c. 56—c. 120), early Roman Empire
• Suetonius, (75–160)

Medieval historians/chroniclers

• Jordanes, (6th century), Goths
• Procopius, (d. c. 565), Byzantines
• Bede, (c. 632–735), Anglo-Saxons
• Geoffrey of Monmouth, churchman/historian
• ibn Khaldun, (1332–1406)
• Christine de Pizan, (c.1365—c.1430), historian, poet, philosopher
• Snorri Sturluson, author of Younger Edda and Heimskringla; d. in 1241

Historians from the time period 1600--1900

• Sharaf Khan Bidlisi, died in 1603
• Voltaire, (1694–1778), French Enlightenment philosopher, historian, and novelist, author of Candide.
• Edward Gibbon, (1737–1794), Roman Empire
• Leopold von Ranke, (1795–1886), German
• William H. Prescott, (1796–1859), US historian of Spain, Mexico, Peru
• Mary Sheldon Barnes, (1850-1898), American
• Henri Pirenne - "one of the most eminent scholars of the Middle Ages and of Belgian national development", says Encyclopædia Britannica; the Belgian died in 1935

Historians after 1900

• Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), history of ideas
• Winston Churchill (1874–1965), U.K. prime minister; World Wars I and II, English-speaking peoples
• Robert Conquest (1917–2015), Russia, Soviet Union
• John Davies (1938–2015), Welsh historian
• Michel Foucault (1926–1984), French historian of ideas / philosopher
• Francis Fukuyama, (b. 1955)
• Martin Gilbert (1936–2015)
• Christopher Hill, (1912–2003), 17th century England
• Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012), British historian, labour history
• Paul Kennedy (born 1945), British historian, author of influential The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
• Thomas Kuhn, (1922–1996), history of science, author of The Copernican Revolution, Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, and the influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Hans Mommsen (1930–2015), German social history
• Richard Pipes (1923–2018), conservative Polish-born American historian, Russian and Soviet history
• Janko Prunk (born 1942), Slovenian historian of modern history
• Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), American president and historian, War of 1812, frontier
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (d. 2008), Russian historian and novelist
• David Starkey (born 1945), Tudor history
• Conrad Totman (born 1934), American historian, wrote A History of Japan
• Eric Williams, (1911–1981), Guyanese historian, Caribbean history, anti-imperialist themes
• Robert M. Young (academic) (d. 2019), American historian, history of medicine and human sciences
• Howard Zinn (1922–2010), American historian, popular U.S. history, the Left in the U.S.

Related pages

• List of historians by country