# The 15 Greatest Historians of All Time

> Ancient chroniclers, television dons and one Nobel laureate who wrote history between wars. Two and a half thousand years of people explaining the past to everybody else.

*By YPB Team · Published August 18, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-15-greatest-historians-of-all-time*

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## Current results (2 votes)

1. **Edward Gibbon** — 100% (2 votes · score 1000/1000)
   Six volumes on the decline and fall of Rome, and English prose has not recovered from the style.
2. **Thucydides** — 0% (0 votes · score 733/1000)
   Wrote the Peloponnesian War as analysis rather than storytelling and is still on strategy syllabuses.
3. **Mary Beard** — 0% (0 votes · score 551/1000)
   Cambridge classicist who has made Roman history mainstream television.
4. **Herodotus** — 0% (0 votes · score 466/1000)
   Called the father of history, and the first to treat hearsay as evidence worth weighing.
5. **Fernand Braudel** — 0% (0 votes · score 466/1000)
   Made geography and daily life the engine of history rather than kings and battles.
6. **A. J. P. Taylor** — 0% (0 votes · score 466/1000)
   Britain's first television historian, lecturing to camera without notes.
7. **Winston Churchill** — 0% (0 votes · score 363/1000)
   Wrote a four-volume life of Marlborough and a history of the English-speaking peoples, and won the Nobel for it.
8. **Barbara Tuchman** — 0% (0 votes · score 363/1000)
   Won two Pulitzers without a doctorate, and wrote the book Kennedy handed to his staff.
9. **Livy** — 0% (0 votes · score 363/1000)
   Told Rome's story from its founding across 142 books, most of them now lost.
10. **Doris Kearns Goodwin** — 0% (0 votes · score 363/1000)
   Pulitzer-winning presidential historian whose Lincoln book became a film.
11. **Simon Schama** — 0% (0 votes · score 363/1000)
   Historian of art, the Dutch republic and Britain, with the television series to match.
12. **Eric Hobsbawm** — 0% (0 votes · score 233/1000)
   His four-volume sweep from 1789 to 1991 defined how a generation read the modern age.
13. **Tacitus** — 0% (0 votes · score 233/1000)
   Roman senator whose compressed, sceptical account of the early emperors set the tone for imperial history.
14. **Ibn Khaldun** — 0% (0 votes · score 233/1000)
   Fourteenth-century North African scholar who effectively invented social history.
15. **Antony Beevor** — 0% (0 votes · score 233/1000)
   The most widely read narrative historian of the Second World War.

Tags: books, all-time, writers