Leopold von Ranke

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'…