For people wondering why this might be relevant to HN - I came across this piece while reading about the origins of UC Santa Cruz and thought some of the advice here was insightful and potentially useful to people who write in general. I like this one for instance:
"Once you have fallen in love with your subject write about it as swiftly as possible. Passion grows cold or turns readily to dogma. There is, generally speaking, nothing more disheartening than an historian who has devoted his whole life to one narrowly conceived subject. It is very largely true that the best work - if one takes into account its length and scope - has been done in a remarkably short time."
Two half-written, heavily researched novels of mine concur. One can never predict how 'busy' one is in the future, nor judge the desire to return to previous work.
Perhaps late nights awake during upcoming Christmas vacation will reawaken the feverish beast. More than likely it will not.
What historians have had to figure out, and sometimes learn the hard way -- these are lessons that over the centuries we have found deep-rooted needs to listen to . . . it's not just about writing history -- it's about thinking . . .
I was trying to figure that out too. These "great historians" are in opposition to what he calls "scientific" historians, which I assumed meant the Annales School (really into sociology and quantitative data).[1] But I don't know all that much about the historiography of the US (and of course things have changed a lot since Smith wrote this in 1973).
My guess is the great historians were those in the nineteenth and early twentieth century who tended toward writing gigantic broad narratives that academic historians love to pick apart and prove wrong. But that's a guess, partially derived from this 1985 interview.[2]
Perhaps some ancient ones, but also more modern historians. When this list was written almost 50 years ago it seems that tradition was already fading, and now...as far as I can tell...it's covered in dust. Old histories inevitably contain aspects we find mistaken (both morally and factually). But I personally love reading them for the strange perspective, the vigorous speculation, the calm judgement.
Gibbon was surely intended as a "Great Historian". And Macaulay (whose "Third Chapter" on the history of the people of England inspired generations of scholars). Maybe Michelet. Prescott. You can still find these all the time in battered Modern Library editions in used book stores.
For my money the greatest historian (who was surely meant) was Jacob Burckhardt, not-quite-incidentally a student of Schopenhauer and friend of Nietzsche. A modern edition will use footnotes to correct claims that turned out to be errors, and you're left with an elegant, sweeping vision of human activity, saturated with all the melancholy and resignation appropriate to the subject.
Two early twentieth century books I've read that probably fit the mold of "great historian" intended by this author are Webb's The Great Plains and Young's Victorian England: Portrait of an Age.
I think what the author means by "old great histories"---as distinct from the many old "scientific" histories that are now merely wrong---is that the historian takes human nature as the primary subject and uses historical fact, at least as best as can be ascertained, as the concrete medium for both exploring and shaping it.
There are a few ways of interpreting that term. Isaiah Berlin has an article called "The Concept of Scientific History" that takes a very broad view of what that could mean:
But I think in this case he probably has in mind people like the Annales school (mentioned in another comment here) - not so much Fernand Braudel, who wasn't particularly scientific although he was dabbled in economic theories like Kondratiev waves. But more the followers of Braudel who became very focused on crunching numbers relating to land usage patterns, trade, and other socioeconomic data from early modern Europe, to the point that they ended up a bit detached from reality, in much the way that some economists seem to be working in an ideal world rather than a real one. There's also Lawrence Stone who as far back as the 1960s was using mainframes and punch cards to figure out trends relating to the decline of the English aristocracy and the rise of the middle class.
I figured the HN crowd might be interested in what Stone had to say about this, so I looked up an old article of his from the 70s on his methods:
"'the 'new' historians have also borrowed from the social scientrists a series of new techniques...: quantification, conscious theoretical models, explicit definition of terms, and a willingness to deal in abstract ideal types as well as in particular realities. The one new tool they have borrowed is the computer... about 1960 historians suddenly gained free access to this immensely powerful but very obtuse machine, which can produce enormous quantities of data at fabulous speed but only if they are presented to it in limited, often rather artificial, categories, and if the questions are extremely clearly, precisely, and logically framed. Fifteen years of varied experience with the machine has led to a greater appreciation among historians both of its potential uses and its real defects... The computer is a machine in the elementary use of which most professional research historians should henceforth be trained -- a six-week course is ample for the purpose -- but it is one which should only be employed as the choice of last resort. Wherever possible, quantitative historians are well advised to work with smaller samples and to use a hand calculator."
"Once you have fallen in love with your subject write about it as swiftly as possible. Passion grows cold or turns readily to dogma. There is, generally speaking, nothing more disheartening than an historian who has devoted his whole life to one narrowly conceived subject. It is very largely true that the best work - if one takes into account its length and scope - has been done in a remarkably short time."