Murray Rothbard writes:
All persons leave an irreplaceable gap when they die; but this gap is truly enormous in the case of Harry Barnes (1889-1968), for in so many ways he was the Last of the Romans. More specifically, he was the last of the founders of the “New History,” that movement at the turn of the century which, headed by Barnes’s friends and mentors Charles A. Beard, Carl L. Becker, and James Harvey Robinson, virtually founded the profession of historian in America and placed its entire stamp on historiography until the advent of World War II. And Harry Barnes was the last of the truly erudite historians. In a field of accelerating narrowness and specialization where the expert on France in the 1830s is likely to know next to nothing about what happened to France in the 1840s, Harry Barnes ranged over the entire field of historical study and vision.
