Both Eric Hobsbawm and eras passing.

I won't kid you: I've read excerpts from Eric Hobsbawm's work, but never an entire book. The British press treated the historian's passing very much as the end of an era, while I was reminded yet again of my year and a half in the late 1980's, abstracting articles from magazines published in the UK. It will suffice to say that growing up in Southern Indiana, neither intellectuals nor Marxists were commonplace.

The Economist: Eric Hobsbawm, historian, died on October 1st, aged 95

Guardian: Eric Hobsbawm: an appreciation: Hobsbawm was the most widely read, influential and respected British intellectual and historian from the Marxist tradition, by Martin Kettle

And, from New Albany's own Professor Joel Vessels; Joel, I hope you don't mind these words going out to a wider public. I think them apt.

Let me play the obvious card here and say that for a variety of reasons we should take a moment to note the passing of Eric Hobsbawm. To cite Tony Judt (in the New York Times obit of Hobsbawm): "If he had not been a lifelong Communist he would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of the 20th century."

This, though, is the stark assessment of a (Francophile) Anglo-historian who spent his culminating, presaging, (if not formative) years in the US and knew what was necessary to say in the left-handed honoring of a man who should simply be recognized as "one of the great historians of the 20th century" no matter one's political affiliation. Many of those who are generally trammeled by the educational system of the US and speak and read only one language (and many who are not) no matter their own general level of education, when they speak of such things as the Annales School more often that not, when they get beyond titles they speak of the undulations of Hobsbawm's work as it rippled across both time and topic. I enjoyed (if that is the proper word) the Guardian obit.