"You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was".- Leopold Von Ranke
 

​As a professor at the University of Berlin, Von Ranke taught history in an influential way that was based off of the accumulation of facts, details and research. He believed that History had to be concentrated on primary and diplomatic developments. 

 

His writings shared that historians should be focused on the facts and not the politics. He wrote that a historian must seek the "Holy hieroglyph" that is God's hand in history, and that the historian must keep an eye for the universe.