A Tragic Sense of Life: Remembering Two Great Historians

Within five days of each other, the English speaking world's two greatest historians to have emerged from the Marxist tradition have died: Eugene Genovese, on September 26, and Eric Hobsbawm, the man whom Genovese described as "the strongest influence on my work," on October 1.

Genovese's subject was the masters and slaves of the antebellum South. The subjects of Hobsbawm books ranged from Latin American bandits to jazz (we shared a great affection for the now-closed jazz club Bradley's, on University Place in New York; I introduced him to Smalls, a tiny club in a basement on Tenth Street that kept extremely late hours), but his most lasting masterpiece is his magisterial multi-volume history of the "long nineteenth century" (1789-1914) -- The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, and The Age of Empire - -that the London Observer famously described as "part of the mental furniture of educated Englishmen."

Legacy of a historian: Remembering Eric Hobsbawm and his Age of Extremes

The brilliant Eric Hobsbawm died at the age of 95 on October 1, 2012. Many progressives and conservatives acknowledged that his books constituted the best introduction to modern history.

Among his most influential works were the four studies comprising the tetralogy The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and The Age of Extremes. The first three told the story of the nineteenth century – emphasizing the interaction between the advent of capitalism and the advance of bourgeois society and politics. The last volume narrated the history of the twentieth century, underlining, among other aspects, the problems created by ideological dogmatism while noting the progress produced by inventive combinations of diverse secular approaches.