The very boring answer is that it becomes possible to write that style of history once you start to have more sources that let you flesh out individual people and individual decisions.

Let me give you an example from modern times, just to illustrate that this is about source bases as much as anything. The history of nuclear weapons is often written very differently about the United States than it is about China or North Korea. This is not just because Americans tend to empathize with Americans and so on. It is because in the case of the US, we have had a lot more information to go on about who made the bomb, why they did it, how they went about doing it, stories of their successes and failures and controversies, whole gripping "rise and fall" narrative arcs of key players (that might get turned into blockbuster movies), and so on.

Whereas for programs where the identities of the key players might still be secret, where the amount of information released about them is highly orchestrated and controlled, we might mostly have literally what you can get from 30,000 feet up in the air or higher: satellite photos, technical intelligence, radiation detectors, and maybe some formal statements that one can reprint but never tell the real story.

So the history of the US atomic bomb can be written as a history of "great men" (that's not the only option, and professional historians frequently try to avoid writing it this way, but it's a possibility and, as it turns out, the most common popularized way to write about it). But the history of the Chinese or North Korean bomb programs cannot, because we don't have access to enough sources to put a "great man" version of the story together. So instead those histories tend not to be "inside stories," but are instead (let us call them) "outside stories." They are stories about facilities being built, about tests, about reactions from other countries. Not heroic scientists or administrators, who are rendered basically invisible (or even if their names are known, essentially just functional entities without any "human" qualities that you need to show them as "great men"). When the USSR collapsed and the Russian archives (briefly) opened, suddenly it became possible to write "heroic" stories about the Soviet bomb program, for example.

Anyway. That is a long-winded example, but I hope it helps. It's really hard to write histories of individuals for things in the far past because the source base is often quite limited. Not always. But often. Whereas by the 19th and 20th centuries the amount of sheer data and evidence of a personalized sort grows really large. Not always — depends who and what you are studying, depends on the person. But often. And that creates the preconditions for even allowing you to focus on individuals in the first place. That doesn't mean you have to write a history like that, of course. But there are narrative draws to focusing on individuals (even if you don't think individuals drive history), and so even works that try to get away from such an approach often use individuals are narrative hooks.

I had an interesting experience at the Ohio State University a few years back.

I went to interview there for a PhD position in ancient history with Rosestein. For whatever reason, no ancient historian participated in the recruitment events, and I ended up spending my time with the diplomatic history crowd (I did not accept that offer, btw, because the classicist crowd, including R, didn't seem to know I was coming, even though they invited me).

These diplomatic history people and I went around and around on the Great Man theory thing. Here's the thing: I might have... well, I can think of two literary sources for Alexander off the top of my head that exist in anything close to a complete state, both composed 100s of years after his life. For Caesar, aside from his own writing and Cicero's letters, I've got four, also composed at least 100 years later. Then there's archaeology and numismatics. With the exception of Cicero, whose letters that survive are almost 1000, it's very hard to get into the mind of these people in antiquity. For my particular subject, the Italian Socii in the Social War, we have nothing except the coinage, of which there are something like 200 surviving examples. I have to look at structures and broader politics, because I can't interrogate my subjects.

These diplomatic guys, they have THOUSANDS of personal and government documents, to the extent that just processing that information becomes an enormous task. It is easier to look at specific relationships between a few people, or between a few countries, and analyse that, rather than doing some sort of "universal" history of the modern period. There's just too much to work with.

They also seemed to me to be pretty well trained in polisci. I happened to do a polisci BA before going into classics, so I'm a little conversant with it.

In International Relations, most textbooks I've seen break up analysis to three levels.

Systems level analysis. Is the international system multi-polar (the usual example is pre WWI), bi-polar (the Cold War), or something else? The idea is to develop a model of how different states in different positions in a given system interact with each other given the constraints of action that the system imposes. For the Cold War, the example was forming blocs. That's the kind of thing I use for my Roman stuff.

There's State level: the idea that different states have different national characteristics. Someone like Harris, going back to the classical world, might argue that Rome became an empire because it had an especially militaristic culture that was imbedded in things as traditional as its calendar, its religion, and whatever passes for its system of education. He also used a bit of systems theory, though he might not have known it.

The third level is what I learned as "Actor" level analysis, though it seems people online now are using "Group" for that level. That deals with the relationships between people making decisions, and how those decisions effect international politics, though it can be used for domestic politics as well - I just got mine from an IR class, so we weren't looking at elections and such.

If you've got thousands of documents, and you're interested in the end of the Cold War, looking at the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev, for instance, makes a bit of sense. How often did they talk? Did they get along? What were the compromises they made? What role did advisors play in that relationship? You've got the documents for all this; you just have to sort them out.

Because you focus on the relationships between actors, it starts to look like Great Man history, even if you're trying to establish some groundwork for a systemic analysis.

Hi there! You’ve asked a question along the lines of ‘why didn’t I learn about X’. We’re happy to let this question stand, but there are a variety of reasons why you may find it hard to get a good answer to this question on /r/AskHistorians.

Firstly, school curricula and how they are taught vary strongly between different countries and even different states. Additionally, how they are taught is often influenced by teachers having to compromise on how much time they can spend on any given topic. More information on your location and level of education might be helpful to answer this question.

Secondly, we have noticed that these questions are often phrased to be about people's individual experiences but what they are really about is why a certain event is more prominent in popular narratives of history than others.

Instead of asking "Why haven't I learned about event ...", consider asking "What importance do scholars assign to event ... in the context of such and such history?" The latter question is often closer to what people actually want to know and is more likely to get a good answer from an expert. If you intend to ask the 'What importance do scholars assign to event X' question instead, let us know and we'll remove this question.

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