Many years ago, in France, there lived a nearly unstoppable badass named Marc Bloch (1886-1944).

Bloch was a French historian who, together with his best buddy, Lucien Febvre, helped found the Annales school of historiography which would come to have a huge impact on 20th century historians the world over. (editor's note: A bunch of others also helped co-found the school, but I'm trying to simplify things a bit)

Annales was part of a broader pushback against 19th century Positivist historiogriography which, while trying to make 'scientific' history, still focused largely on domestic politics, diplomacy, and military history. Bloch and Febvre said 'hold up, society is bigger than just politicians, diplomats and military battles. Let's do social and economic history too!' So they start an intellectual partnership which produces tons of really cool books on Medieval and Modern European history. Tons of other historians were hip to the jive they were laying down, leading to their approach being imitated and a new historiographical school (Annales) being born, named after the magazine where they published much of their work, the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale (Annales of Economic and Social History).

Now, helping give birth to an entire school of historiography is more than a big enough contribution for most people. Not for badass Marc Bloch though.

At the peak of his career, Bloch was horrified by the sudden invasion of France by the Nazis in 1940. As France's defenses crumbled away, it became clear that the Nazis were there to stay. Most people, especially most Jewish people, as was Marc Bloch, thought about either hiding or fleeing. Not Bloch. In 1942 he joined the Resistance and for two, long, glorious years he helped give the Nazi occupiers a black eye from time to time.

Unfortunately, after two long years of guerrilla warfare, Bloch was caught by the Nazis in 1944 and executed together with several other members of the Resistance. He was two years shy of his 60th birthday.

Bloch was one of several important French intellectuals to fight back. The still renowned novelist and philosopher, Albert Camus, also fought as a part of the Resistance. George Orwell, born Eric Blair, had fought in the Spanish Civil War against the Nazi backed military uprising headed by Francisco Franco, and even produced a great book about it, Homage to Catalonia.

While Bloch is well known for his contributions to historiography, his badass life as a Resister against the Nazis is far less well known. His life goes to show you that it is possible to be both a great academic and a great mensch.

Much of this is shamelessly lifted from my book, but hey it's mine!

The historian I choose as a badass, isn't nearly as badass as Marc Bloch. But he's a badass in the most hysterical and erotic of victorian ways. Indeed, he's not even a historian, so to speak, but he is a bibliographer, and is invaluable to historians of sexuality and pornography.

Henry Spencer Ashbee, on the surface, was a quite reputable and successful Victorian gentleman. Born in 1834 to moderately successful Kentish parents, Robert and Frances Ashbee, Henry Spencer would go on to become an extremely successful businessman himself when he married his wife, Elizabeth Lavy (their son Charles became a famous artist). His new father-in-law made him the head of a small branch of the textile company Charles Lavy & Co, and under Ashbee's management the firm grew to be tremendously successful in England, France, Spain, Belgium and the United States. Much of Ashbee's success is attributed to his amazing grasp of languages and literature—as a child he had been educated in Greek, Latin, modern languages, and literature. He never attended university or college, but his grasp of French and Spanish were so good that he had an entry in the French version of Who's Who and was elected to a prestigious post as a Spanish literary critic.

His fluency also aided him in his obsessive and secret hobby; a hobby that ended up becoming the great passion of his life. Behind the scenes, "he was engaged in the ambitious project of becoming the century's leading collector and bibliographer or erotic books. Ashbee emerges as the archetypical Victorian gentleman with a secret." He began this hobby probably under the influence of a close friend of his, but eventually—probably due to a lot of money and a lot of time to read—he began to be obsessive about his collection, buying copies of every erotic text he came across. His trips across Europe on business helped in this goal, and he even made friends with a British ambassador who would smuggle erotic books into England in government bags (which could not be searched).

In his early forties, Henry Spencer Ashbee decided he needed to set himself to a new project, as a way of giving back to all of his rich friends who had helped him collect these erotic and pornographic books—he decided to write a trilogy of Indexes of erotic literature. In his first Index, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, published in 1877, he described his reasons for doing this:

That English erotic literature should never have had its bibliographer is not difficult to understand. First and foremost the English nation possesses an ultra-squeamishness and hyper-prudery peculiar to itself, sufficient alone to deter any author of position and talent from taking in hand so tabooed a subject; and secondly English books of that class have generally been written with so little talent delicacy or art that in addition to the objectionableness of the subject itself they would undoubtedly be considered by most bibliographers as totally unworthy of any consideration whatever.

Ashbee, along with a group of male intellectuals in the Victorian era (including the famous Sir Richard Francis Burton, the adventurer, translator, and close friend of Ashbee), was profoundly disturbed by what he saw as the backwards sexual morality and 'hyper-prudishness' of English and American society at the time. His Indexes were partially a way to preserve the transient pornographic texts that were the most likely to be destroyed. As a result, many of his excerpts are the only surviving record of these books that we have today. Preempting the charge that his commentaries are obscene, Pisanus Fraxi insists that, “in treating of obscene books it is self-evident that obscenities cannot be avoided,” adding immediately that in his own text, he will never be caught using an “impure word when one less distasteful but equally expressive can be found.” And, anyways, nobody was going to be aroused by his commentaries:

The passions are not excited. Although the citations I produce are frequently licentious, being as a matter of course those which I have considered the most remarkable or most pungent in the books from which they are extracted; yet I give only so much as is necessary to form a correct estimate of the style of the writer, of the nature of the book, or the course of the tale, not sufficient to inflame the passions. This could only be accomplished by the perusal of the books in their entirety, by the reader giving himself up in fact to the author. My extracts on the contrary will, I trust and believe, have a totally opposite effect and as a rule will inspire so hearty a disgust for the books they are taken from, that the reader will have learned enough about them from my pages and will be more than satisfied to have nothing further to do with them.

Being as knowledgeable as he was, Henry Spencer Ashbee knew that if he didn't think of something clever, his indexes and his entire pornographic collection would be destroyed upon his death. Therefore, he came up with a really clever tactic; along with his pornography collection, he had the world's largest collection of Don Quixote and Cervantes manuscripts and prints, so when he died, he offered both the erotica and the Cervantes to the British Museum on the condition that they take all of it (excepting duplicates) or none of it.

Ian Gibson records the dilemma of the Museum on finding out the terms of the bequest. On the subject of the obscene books, the Museum stated that, “[we] have gone through the whole of them and have packed six boxes the duplicate copies. He asked the permission of the Trustees to destroy them.” Peter Mendes has speculated that, along with the duplicates, the Museum “destroyed the greater part of Ashbee's collection of 'poorly produced, illustrated pornographic fiction (particularly in English) of the nineteenth century,' perhaps some hundred items.” Since no other copies of many of these books seem to have survived, they have now been lost to research forever. Regardless, his endless quotes, speculation, creative interpretations have proven a invaluable resource.

Probably the most badass act of history-writing, committed by a man almost as badass as the inimitable Marc Bloch, was his spiritual successor, Fernand Braudel (1902-1985). For much of the twentieth century, gaining a PhD in France was much more difficult than in the rest of the western world, often taking several decades and requiring an enormous thesis (half a million words was not uncommon). Braudel decided in the 1920s to do his on the early modern Mediterranean, spending most of the 1930s buried in archives in between teaching gigs in Algeria, Paris and as a founding faculty member of the university of Sao Paolo. It was on the transatlantic voyage back from Brazil that he first met Lucien Febvre - Marc Bloch's great partner. They hit it off: Febvre became Braudel's teacher and mentor and Braudel became a committed Annaliste, the bright shining star of the movement.

By 1939, Braudel had finished his archival research and was all ready to write his magnum opus, but unfortunately that's where the Nazis come in. Like many Frenchmen at the time, Braudel joined up to fight the impending German invasion, but with the rapid fall of France in 1940, he was shipped off to a POW camp in Lubeck in north-eastern Germany. Suddenly finding himself with lots of free time on his hands, Braudel decided to write a masterpiece of history that would fundamentally change histriography in the 20th century: his thesis, entitled La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II). He drafted the entire manuscript from memory without any of his sources, any of his books or any of his notes (the guards only permitted him poor quality letter paper and occasional visits to a small local library).

After the war, he went back to Paris, finished up his studies (filling in the footnotes) and went on the revolutionize the discipline.

David Brion Davis had already been accepted to university to do history when he got drafted in 1945. He was trained for the invasion of Japan, which would have put him in the same campaign my grandfather was meant for. The war ended early, so instead he got shipped to Germany to do occupation duty on the grounds that he had some German. On the ship over, he was given a billy club and told to go below decks to ensure- His commander used an old timey racial slur I will omit, which, by a weird coincidence, is how my great-grandmother (born 1891) referred to a half-egyptian cousin of mine- hadn't got up to any gambling.

Davis did not know until that point that about two thousand black men were on the ship. He went down and gave it a look. There were lots of craps games going on. Well, that was a thing. Davis hid in a corner and minded his own business. Later on during the occupation, he was increasingly struck by how Germans trained to believe Aryan supremacy didn't seem to have a big problem with black Americans, but white Americans sure did. Later on he was called out with his unit to intervene in a dispute between some black soldiers and some southern officers, at which point he was ordered to draw his gun and prepare to fire on the blacks. He was disturbed, doubly so when officers started telling him that black soldiers were a bigger problem than Germans.

So when he came home he went to Harvard, where he found that slavery was a marginal topic and most history about it was written with essentially the same attitude he saw on display in the military. His response to this was to become one of the premier modern historians of slavery. I have not read nearly enough of his work, but Inhuman Bondage is a great introduction to the subject.

Sources

Davis tells his story here (PDF) and with less detail in Inhuman Bondage.

This thread needs to feature the first and finest. You can probably tell that one of these is more badass than the others.

Herodotos (c. 484-425 BC), as a small child, watched the shattered remains of Artemisia's fleet limp back into the harbour at his hometown of Halikarnassos after its defeat at the battle of Salamis. His father seems to have been involved in a quashed uprising against a local tyrant, leading to Herodotos growing up in exile on Samos. He spent much of his adult life in Athens, but travelled across the Eastern Mediterranean, to Egypt, possibly the Crimea, and into the Persian Empire as far as Babylon. In the 440s, he was among the founders of the Athenian-led panhellenic settlement of Thourioi, which replaced the destroyed city of Sybaris in Southern Italy. The famous author of the history of the Persian Wars, much of his work was clearly written to warn his readers against a future in which the Greeks would destroy themselves in internecine conflict - but to no avail. Herodotos lived to see the beginning of the long and terribly destructive Peloponnesian War.

Thucydides (c. 460-400 BC) was a member of one of the richest families of Athens. He owned gold mines in Thrace and had close connections to the most prominent men in the democracy. He may have been involved in the crushing of the revolt of Samos in 440 BC; when the great plague hit Athens in 429 BC, he contracted and survived it; in 424 BC, he was elected general to save Amphipolis from falling into Spartan hands, but he and his naval contingent arrived too late, and was exiled from Athens as punishment. He spent the next 20 years gathering information for his History from sources across Greece, probably mainly living at his estates in Thrace, until the victorious Spartan admiral Lysander arranged for all Athenian exiles to return to Athens in 404 BC.

Xenophon (c. 430-354 BC) was a student of Sokrates, and likely familiar with men like Plato, Alkibiades and Kritias. As a young man, he served in the Athenian cavalry, possibly fighting the Spartans for much of the Dekeleian War (413-404 BC). After Athens' defeat, he probably helped to prop up the violently oppressive regime of the Thirty, imposed by Sparta.

In 401 BC, he accepted a friend's invitation to join the mercenary army that Kyros the Younger, the crown prince of Persia, was gathering in Asia Minor for shadowy reasons. He ended up following this army into the heart of the Persian empire, fighting at Kounaxa near Babylon to support Kyros' bid for the Persian throne. When Kyros died in the battle, and the commanders of the mercenaries were betrayed and killed by Artaxerxes II, Xenophon quickly rose to second-in-command of the army called the Men of Kyros, but nowadays usually called the Ten Thousand. He helped lead this army through hostile territory, constantly harassed by Persian pursuers and native tribes, over the frozen mountain passes of Armenia, back to the Greek city-states on the coast of the Black Sea. From there, he marched them along the coast, now supreme commander of the Ten Thousand; they fought Persians, Armenians, Bithynians and Thracians, eventually crossing over to Europe to take service with the Thracian king Seuthes, before returning to the Greek world at Byzantion. From there, they were almost immediately scooped up by the Spartan commander Thibron, who could use some hardened mercenaries, since Sparta (having supported Kyros' bid for the throne) was now at war with the Persian Empire.

For 5 more years (399-394 BC), Xenophon and his men served the Spartans as mercenaries. They fought and plundered their way through the western edge of the Persian Empire, and then, when war broke out in Greece, they fought their way back on foot through Thrace and Thessaly to defend the Spartan cause at the battle of Koroneia.

At the end of his service, Xenophon was one of the most experienced and capable military commanders of his day, familiar with forms of tactical manoeuvre and combined-arms warfare that even the Spartan army couldn't match. He was also, for at least the following 27 years, an exile from Athens. Noting his support for Sokrates, for the Thirty, for Kyros, and for Sparta, the Athenian Assembly had decreed that he was not to return home. This decree was not rescinded until the 360s, when relations between Athens and Sparta finally became more friendly. Xenophon, who had lived out his days running the estate near Olympia that the Spartans had given him, was finally able to return to Athens in 367 BC - though we can't tell if he ever did. All we know is that his sons, who had been through the ruthless Spartan education, served in the Athenian cavalry like their father, and that it was his grim duty to write about the battle in which one of them was killed by the Thebans. He spent the final decades of his life writing history and philosophy and inventing one literary genre after another, from the encomium to the military manual to the autobiography to the historical novel. Later ancient authors gushed about his prose style, calling him the "Attic Muse" and putting him on par with Plato as the greatest of Sokrates' students.