# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/leopold-von-ranke
# Generated: 2026-09-02T06:07:07.503Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/leopold-von-ranke"
name: "Leopold von Ranke"
slug: "leopold-von-ranke"
description: "The German historian who made \"go to the archives\" the rule. Before Ranke, history was often secondhand storytelling; he insisted on primary sources, built the first historical seminar, and turned the discipline empirical."
tagline: "German historian and founder of modern source-based history (1795-1886)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Jebens%2C_Adolf_-_Leopold_von_Ranke_(detail)_-_1875.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "Germany"
  isoCode: "DE"
category:
  name: "Writers"
  slug: "writers"
profileType:
  name: "Writer / Author"
  slug: "writer"
birthDate: "1795-12-21"
deathDate: "1886-05-23"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           58.22
  momentum:             0
  historical:           24.33786
  currentAttention:     0
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
ranks:
  global:   null
  country:  null
  category: null
tags:
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    slug: "academics"
  - name: "Writer / Author"
    slug: "writer-author"
  - name: "History"
    slug: "history"
  - name: "Literature"
    slug: "literature"
  - name: "19th Century"
    slug: "19th-century"
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    title: "ལིའུ་པོལ་ཌི་བོན་ཪཱན་ཀེ།"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Born in 1795, Ranke studied at Göttingen and absorbed the school's rigorous methods, then sharpened them. Influenced by Barthold Georg Niebuhr, he developed a gift for narrative that never outran the evidence—archival documents became the foundation, not decoration. He brought the seminar method into his classroom, training a generation to work the same way. His emphasis on political history and international relations set the template for decades of scholarship. Ennobled in 1865, he carried his work into old age. Critics later pointed to the Lutheran thread in his thinking: a belief that God's hand moved through events, that the German Empire itself was divine intent made visible.