In 1959, Ritter was elected an honorary member of the American Historical Association in recognition of what the Association described as his struggle with totalitarianism. He was the fifth German historian to be so honored by the AHA, one of the last historians of the traditional German idealist school, which considered history as an art. He concerned himself with an imaginative identification with his subjects, focused on the great men of the times studied and was primarily concerned with political and military events.Levine, Norman "Ritter, Gerhard" pages 304-306 from Great Historians of the Modern Age edited by Lucan Boia, New York: Greenwood Press, 1991, pages 305-306.
