Surveying 2,500 years of historians

Herodotus and Thucydides stand at the very portals of (Western) history. The great climax of Herodotus is the war between the Greeks and Persians (Hellene against foreigner) but he leads up to it by exploring many other ancient cultures and civilizations, including the Egyptians. He is the man for wide-eyed and yet, despite his recounting of fabulous and mythic beliefs, relatively clear-sighted Wonder. The more incisive Thucydides immortalized the Peloponnesian War (Greek against Greek), which was of recent memory, and yet in such a way that he has provided invaluable lessons for his successors. Macaulay's many-volumed history of England is a classic and may be seen as a superb example of history from a point of view: the Whig interpretation of the past.