> Besides which, "whoever is mentioned needs to be as great as these three" is your own special rule for which only you are the judge, which is not a particular

> Besides which, "whoever is mentioned needs to be as great as these three" is your own special rule for which only you are the judge, which is not a particularly convincing argument to anyone but yourself. If Tanner had meant 'any random historian', he would have said so and used them (and also disagreed with the example I provided of Machiavelli, who is a famous example of this trope). He used the most relevant examples, like Sima Qian and Thucydides, who he writes about extensively elsewhere, and note by the way the context here of the Thucydides Roundtable. It is a basic fact of linguistics that you choose examples to be as central and relevant as possible (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle). Nor am I sold on the Dunning example. It may be well known to you, but it's not that famous, and Dunning wasn't even from or educated in the South, much less was involved in the Civil War or Reconstruction in any way as a loser.