Together they are known for having introduced a critical theory of history in Swedish historical research, inspired by German historian, Leopold von Ranke.
At Berlin, he attended lectures by Leopold von Ranke, the founder of history as a respectable academic discipline based on sources and records rather than personal opinions.
In particular, the British Roman Catholic historian Lord Acton defended Ranke's book as the most fair-minded, balanced and objective study ever written on the papacy of the 1500s.
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In 1884, he was appointed the first honorary member of the American Historical Association.
For a long time, under the influence of Leopold von Ranke, the era of reforms was presented first and foremost as a story of the deeds and destinies of "great men", as shown by the large number of biographies written about the reformers - Hans Delbrück wrote about Gneisenau and Meinecke about Boyen, for example.
Historian R.C. Rudolph argues that Zhao's emphasis on consulting contemporary sources for accurate dating is parallel with the concern of the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Otto von Bismarck | Alexander von Humboldt | Wernher von Braun | Carl Maria von Weber | Herbert von Karajan | Leopold II of Belgium | Leopold Stokowski | Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher | John von Neumann | Lars von Trier | Ferdinand von Mueller | Paul von Hindenburg | Alexander von Humboldt Foundation | Heinrich von Kleist | Anne Sofie von Otter | Erich von Stroheim | Max von Sydow | Léopold Sédar Senghor | Justus von Liebig | Hermann von Helmholtz | Franz von Papen | Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg | Carl von Clausewitz | Leopold II | Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor | Von Ryan's Express | Richard von Weizsäcker | Leopold I of Belgium | Leopold Auer |
In Berlin, Comfort was influenced by meetings and studies with the philosopher Friedrich Kaulbach, Carl Richard Lepsius (curator of Egyptology at the Berlin Museum), Gemäldegalerie director Gustav Waagen, Leopold von Ranke, among others.
In the early years of his scholarly engagement, Novaković translated into Serbian Leopold von Ranke's monumental work Die Serbische Revolution, as well as its revised and updated edition (1864–1892) as well as the equally famous Histoire de Charles XII by Voltaire (1897) and Joseph Scherr, General History of Literature from German (1872–1874).