4-2 Short Paper: Historiography from Ranke’s Perspective Leopold Von Ranke has been praised for his accomplishments to find historical truth and evidence in his research and historical writing. His method of scientific history, combining historical and scientific research methods, have transformed how history is written. In the American Scholar, a scholarly journal an article entitled, Historiography: What Ranke Meant, discusses Ranke’s method of historical investigations, “One claim is that history is a science, that it is primarily concerned with facts and their casual connection – how they acted upon each other. Like any other science, therefore, history has its own method, the critical method and here Ranke extended the critical method of philology to the entire study of the past.” Ranke developed this method of historical writing, because he felt that…show more content… In a sense as Ranke was growing up, so was the United States. Ranke, who was from Germany, was intrigued by the development of Universities teaching historical and scientific studies. I think Jefferson would have been captivated by Ranke’s ability to be honest in the search for the truth. Their combined admiration for learning would have made them either political rivals or best friends, I’m not sure which. My topic being, Jefferson and his political and personal struggle with slavery in America, would have been an interesting subject to Ranke, because it deals with humanity. Especially the humanity of a singular race being held captive in bondage. Penetrating evidence to discover the actuality of the historical facts, especially primary sources that would have been available in an abundance during Ranke and Jefferson’s lifetimes, to document from a historiography approach would have been valuable evidence in finding more truths about
