Posted this on /his/ but it was buried under a mound of inane

>>8774941
INANE MEMERY!
DID SOMEBODY SAY INANE MEMERY?
OH BOY (oh) BOYO, WADDA GODDA DO DA GO!?

>Hobsbawm
I like the bit where his marxism outweighs his jewishness :3 Good historian

Hobsbawm's book on the twentieth century is a lot more contentious than is generally well-liked book on the nineteenth century, and he's a card-carrying Marxist and, some say, Stalinist apologist. Keep that in mind.

Still, in reading history you should always read everything you can. As long as you're mindful of biases and mindful that you're only getting one "face" of a shape you can only get a good idea of by combining multiple accounts and careful reading.

Bloch is an incredible historian and kind of a darling of the historical profession, which is dominated by French scholarship, and he's especially a French folk hero. He was shot by the Gestapo for participating in the Resistance, after having fought in WW1. The Historian's Craft was only partially written, from memory, during this time. (One of his "successors" at the school and journal he founded, the Annales, which is reshaped the entire Western discipline of history, was also reading his magnum opus in a POW camp at this time - Fernand Braudel).

Bloch and Lucien Febvre together were the founders of the Annales school, which practically founded modern social and economic history as we know it (contentious statement but really).

A few years earlier Bloch also wrote Strange Defeat, a book on the incomprehensibility felt by the French at their rapid defeat in WW2. His entire oeuvre is completely worth reading - the early work you mention, Le rois thaumaturges, was groundbreaking in the historical method of mentalities, I believe inspired by his experiences (on which he wrote an earlier essay) of watching how rumour and belief spread among the troops in WW1. His other big thing is Feudal Society, which still looms over medieval studies. Some of his later stuff, mostly published as essays, has been collated in anthologies too. These came after his years in the interdisciplinary hodgepodge of the University of Strasbourg with Febve and a dozen other brilliant figures in anthropology, sociology, etc.

He's huge for comparative history, mentalities, rural history, and interdisciplinary historiography especially - it's largely due to Bloch and Febvre that history became the "queen" of the social/human sciences in France for generations, and this dominance then spread to other countries (oddly enough, largely through Hobsbawm's own group - Past & Present, the Marxist historical journal), and took on such a fluid interdisciplinary character.

Unbelievably titanically brilliant guy like you say, but also reportedly the nicest, humblest man ever. Caroline Fink has a good biography on him.

Just saying all this so you can fully appreciate The Historian's Craft. It's an unfinished book literally written by a man on the run from the Nazis FROM MEMORY, after a lifetime of erudition and a mind that was like the perfect storm at the perfect time. Historian's Craft is loaded with insight.

>>8776914
Sorry this post is sloppy as fuck I wrote it really quickly

Meant to say Braudel WROTE The Mediterranean in the POW camps