by Chris Campbell @Chris__Campbell
Although the idea of the ‘public historian’ is a relatively recent concept – spurred on by the growth in consumption of documentaries, podcasts, blogs and social media – there have always been academic historians who have found a broader readership and commanded a certain influence amongst the general public.
This new series of Historian Highlights aims to explore those academics of the past who were doing history in public long before TikTok put millions of viewers within arm’s reach, and seeks to understand their impact on the popular view and interpretation of history.
We begin with a man who, at the time of his death in 2012, was arguably the most widely-read historian in the world: Eric Hobsbawm
Hobsbawm’s impact on the practice of public history was significant, not least because he himself had lived through so many of the major historical events of the twentieth century that captured the popular imagination.
Born in Alexandria in 1917 during the height of the British Empire’s control over Egypt, Hobsbawm later moved to Berlin where his Jewish heritage and interest in Marxism clashed with the growing Nazi threat. This culminated in personal involvement when, in January 1933 at the age of fifteen, he took part in the last anti-Nazi demonstration before the party’s total consolidation of power. Moving to the United Kingdom and studying history at King’s College, Cambridge, Hobsbawm’s formative experiences in Germany shaped his student life and led him to join the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936. After service in the Royal Engineers during the Second World War, his association with communism attracted the attention of MI5 and prevented him from obtaining both a job at the BBC and a lectureship at Cambridge. He secured a position at Birkbeck College in London where he remained for the rest of his career, notably co-founding the academic journal Past & Present in 1952. He stayed a committed and outspoken Marxist, even in the face of Cold War hostilities and the brutal atrocities of the Soviet regime.[1]
Those close encounters with major societal change and ideological extremism clearly informed Hobsbawm’s political outlook, but also gave him a distinct historical authority on his subject matter. Unlike some of his contemporaries – products of the cloistered world of the British education system – Hobsbawm’s early life had been intensely affected by the historical forces and ideas about which he would later write.[2]
Hobsbawm’s scholarship and intellectual position, inextricably bound to his politics and experiences, earned him no shortage of detractors but also brought his work before a wider audience. As he grew increasingly vocal about the problems and the fate of the British Left, so too did his work find new readers beyond the academy; at the time of his death, his books had been translated into over fifty languages and had sold well into the millions.
Yet, politics aside, it was of course Hobsbawm’s skill as a historian and writer that built and sustained his reputation amongst the general public. As many in the historical profession moved towards an ever greater degree of specialisation, Hobsbawm retained the rare ability to write about history across a much longer timeframe but, crucially, without compromising the precision of his historical analysis. Thus his most famous work, the tetralogy of ‘Ages’ (Revolution, Capital, Empire and Extremes), spans two hundred years of history from the French Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but is no less scholarly for its breadth of focus. He managed to walk that finest of lines between rigorous academic insight and immense readability.
Indeed, it was largely through Hobsbawm’s books and commentary – increasingly to be found on both radio and television – that he impressed upon the public an altogether different view of history, one which framed it less as a collection of dates and facts to be memorised and more as a complex web of interconnected human forces spanning economics, politics and culture. His extensive writing on the subject of history itself was as much a bestseller as his original research.[3] As Susan Pedersen notes, Hobsbawm ‘taught two generations of students and general readers across the world to see history not as one-damn-thing-after-another but as a matter of theme and process, cause and effect’.[4]
It was that lasting commitment to explaining both the impact of the grand sweep of history on the present and the very nature of historical inquiry that built Hobsbawm an immense following, and had such a profound impact on the public’s view of history.
Further Reading (all by Eric Hobsbawm unless otherwise indicated)
The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848 (Abacus; 1962)
The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 1975)
The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 1987)
The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (Michael Joseph; 1994)
Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (Lawrence & Wishart; 1969)
Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press; 1991)
On History (Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 1997)
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press; 2012)
Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (Little, Brown; 2013)
Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (Little, Brown; 2019)
[1] See Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (Little, Brown; 2019)
[2] On his own reflections, see Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (Abacus; 2003)
[3] See Hobsbawm, On History (Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 1997)
[4] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n08/susan-pedersen/i-want-to-love-it (accessed 20/2/24)
Doing History in Public 