Georg Iggers was born in Hamburg and fled Nazi Germany for the US in 1926, at age 12. He ended up graduating with a PhD from the University of Chicago and has become a preeminent intellectual historian and a leading scholar on historiography. He retired from teaching at State University of New York at Buffalo in 1977. His books include The German Conception of History (1968), New Directions in European Historiography (1975), Historiography in the Twentieth Century (1997), and A Global History of Modern Historiography (2008). His books have been translated into fourteen European and East Asian languages, and his 1997 book provides the topic for this week's discussion. In Historiography in the Twentieth Century, Iggers first addresses the process by which history became a professional science. Citing Ranke, we see how there was a desire to develop the history into a sort of "rigorous science  practiced only by professional historians. These efforts gave history legitimacy, and formed the foundations of our discipline. I found the discussion of historical timelines to be particularly interesting. We learn that French historians theorized history in a way that allowed for the emergency of microhistory, moving away from political history to analysis of social and economic change. Postmodernists went a step further--they believed that the search for the truth is an ongoing process. They considered that historical narratives could be seen as "verbal fictions  that were "as much invented as found.  This perspective ends up leading to a sort of combined historical method where historians can add personal perspective to historical analysis. In our second reading, we read Ranke's original work. Ranke helped "shape historical profession as it emerged in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century.  He introduced the seminar classroom teaching method, and focused on analysis of historical documents and archival research techniqu