Full of dicks

These are the choices History Today gives you for for the most important historian of the last sixty years:

• Anthony Beevor
• Asa Briggs
• Fernand Braudel
• EH Carr
• Richard J. Evans
• Niall Ferguson
• Eric Hobsbawm
• Simon Schama
• David Starkey
• AJP Taylor
• EP Thompson
• Hugh Trevor-Roper

One does wonder if having a weewee is the first requisite for being an important historian… Could History Today readers really not think of any female historians with the same stature as Niall Ferguson? No Mary Beard or Rosamond McKitterick or Judith Herrin?

On the other hand, what Chris Williams said in the comments thread on this at B&T makes a lot of sense too:

I think that the best history is usually done at a level which tends not to impact on the consciousness of the general public: to understand the past we need 300 brilliant historians, no one of whom need stand head or shoulders above the others. We can’t do it with just 10 geniuses whom the public recognise.

So what elevates the ‘top ten’ over the other 290? Usually, sicking their necks out in some kind of synthesis – but alas! this tends to take them either to places best occupied by social scientists or philosophers, or to the Schamaverse. There are a lot of good female historians in the top 300 (I work, or have worked, with or for some of them), but very few if any in a notional top ten, perhaps because aside from the odd genius (EPT) you get there by proving that you are very clever rather than finding out new things about the past. And that’s why I would put AJPT in the ‘baddies’ column rather than the ‘goodies’.