Gertrude Himmelfarb, a conservative historian, approached history through a different lens than either Howard Zinn or E.P. Thompson. As a conservative, Himmelfarb adhered to the traditional view of history, which insisted that the actions of great men and the ideas of great thinkers were the driving forces in history. She was widely respected for her honesty and her meticulous devotion to detail in her own research.

Howard Zinn, an American, was a Marxian, a historian influenced by Marxist thought but not himself a Marxist per se. E.P. Thompson, a Briton, was a Communist, and therefore, a Marxist historian. Both men held a different view of history from Himmelfarb, one that decentered the "great man" and put economic forces and class struggle at history's center. They both believed that history could be best understood in terms of a bigger picture rather than through individual great men: great men and small, they argued, were both constrained and motivated to action by the economic structures of their societies, a situation which would lead inevitably to the end of capitalism. They both put their focus on the actions of the working classes.

In 1987's The New History and the Old, Himmelfarb stated that both Zinn and E.P. Thompson, like other Marxian—or in Thompson's case, Marxist—historians:

cannot abandon, or even hold in abeyance, their political agenda of changing the world while engaged in the historical task of interpreting it.

She critiqued Zinn, Thompson, and others for putting Marxist economic thought ahead of politics and accused them of fitting their historical facts to their preexisting theories. In other words, she said that their pre-existing ideas interfered with their objectivity as historians.

Himmelfarb was known for being generous to those whose views she opposed—however, she herself has been critiqued from the perspective that no historical view or historian is purely objective, not ever her.