Historian

===19th century===
The tumultuous events surrounding the [[French Revolution]] inspired much of the historiography and analysis of the early 19th century. Interest in the 1688 [[Glorious Revolution]] was also rekindled by the [[Great Reform Act]] of 1832 in England.

[[Thomas Carlyle]] published his magnum opus, the three-volume ''[[The French Revolution: A History]]'' in 1837.<ref>{{cite book |first=H.E. |last=Marshall |chapter-url=http://marshall.thefreelibrary.com/English-Literature-For-Boys-And-Girls/82-1 |chapter=Carlyle – The Sage Of Chelsea |title=English Literature For Boys And Girls |via=Farlex Free Library |access-date=2009-09-19}}</ref><ref name="LL">{{cite web|url=http://www.criminalbrief.com/?p=8890 |title=Thomas Carlyle| last=Lundin|first=Leigh| date=2009-09-20|work=Professional Works|publisher=Criminal Brief|access-date=2009-09-20}}</ref> The resulting work had a passion new to historical writing. [[Thomas Macaulay]] produced his most famous work of history, ''[[The History of England from the Accession of James the Second]]'', in 1848.<ref>Macaulay, Thomas Babington, ''History of England''. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1878. Vol. V, title page and prefatory "Memoir of Lord Macaulay".</ref>  His writings are famous for their ringing prose and for their confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with the freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the [[Whig history|Whig interpretation of history]].<ref>J. R. Western, ''Monarchy and Revolution. The English State in the 1680s'' (London: Blandford Press, 1972), p. 403.</ref>

[[File:Jules Michelet portrait older.jpg|upright|thumb|Jules Michelet, later in his career.]]
In his main work ''Histoire de France'', French historian [[Jules Michelet]] coined the term [[Renaissance]] (meaning "Re-birth" in [[French language]]), as a period in Europe's cultural history that represented a break from the Middle Ages, creating a modern understanding of humanity and its place in the world.<ref>{{cite book|last=Brotton|author-link1=Jerry Brotton|first=Jerry|title=The Renaissance Bazaar|year=2002|publisher=Oxford University Press |pages=21–22}}</ref>
The nineteen-volume work covered French history from [[Charlemagne]] to the outbreak of the [[French Revolution|Revolution]]. Michelet was one of the first historians to shift the emphasis of history to the common people, rather than the leaders and institutions of the country. Another important French historian of the period was [[Hippolyte Taine]]. He was the chief theoretical influence of French [[Naturalism (literature)|naturalism]], a major proponent of [[sociological positivism]] and one of the first practitioners of [[Historicism|historicist]] criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate with him.<ref>Kelly, R. Gordon, ''"Literature and the Historian"'', American Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 2 (1974), 143.</ref>

One of the major progenitors of the history of [[cultural history|culture]] and [[art history|art]], was the Swiss historian [[Jacob Burckhardt]]<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/history/historian/Jacob_Burckhardt.html|title=Jacob Burckhardt The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy Cultural history|website=www.age-of-the-sage.org}}</ref> Burckhardt's best-known work is ''[[The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy]]'' (1860). According to [[John Lukacs]], he was the first master of cultural history, which seeks to describe the spirit and the forms of expression of a particular age, a particular people, or a particular place.<ref>John Lukacs, Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge, ed. Mark G Malvasi and Jeffrey O. Nelson, Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004, 215.</ref> By the mid-19th century, scholars were beginning to analyse the history of institutional change, particularly the development of constitutional government. [[William Stubbs]]'s  ''Constitutional History of England'' (3 vols., 1874–78) was an important influence on this developing field. The work traced the development of the English constitution from the Teutonic invasions of Britain until 1485, and marked a distinct step in the advance of English historical learning.<ref>[[s:A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature/Stubbs, William]]</ref>

[[Karl Marx]] introduced the concept of [[historical materialism]] into the study of world-historical development. In his conception, the economic conditions and dominant modes of production determined the structure of society at that point. Previous historians had focused on the cyclical events of the rise and decline of rulers and nations. Process of [[nationalization of history]], as part of [[Romantic nationalism|national revival]]s in the 19th century, resulted with separation of "one's own" history from common [[Universal history (genre)|universal history]] by such way of perceiving, understanding and treating the past that constructed history as history of a nation.<ref name = "laboratory">{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=f52rawP96lYC&q=%22nationalisation+of+history%22&pg=PA39|title=A Laboratory of Transnational History Ukraine and recent Ukrainian historiography|access-date=October 18, 2010|author=Georgiy Kasianov, Philipp Terr|pages=7|quote=This essay deals with, what I call, "nationalized history", meaning a way of perceiving, understanding and treating the past that requires separation of "one's own" history from "common" history and its construction as history of a nation.|isbn=978-1-84545-621-4|date=2010-04-07|publisher=Berghahn Books }}</ref> A new discipline, [[sociology]], emerged in the late 19th century and analyzed and compared these perspectives on a larger scale.