When i was in grad school many profs talked about a "theoretical tool kit" in which one should be able to take the same data set and apply different theoretical lenses to understand the ways that arguments may be created.

Historical materialism sure had its heyday in archaeology and other humanities, but the real task is to understand that there are rarely professionals who take on a particular stripe or method of analysis to the complete exclusion of others.

like anything historical materialism has its uses and its detractions/weaknesses.

Historians internationally aren't as likely to get caught up in the kinds of theoretical debates that often consume scholars in other fields. You might try over at /r/AskAnthropology, where you'll probably find a larger community both familiar and comfortable with the term 'historical materialism'. For the benefit of historians and our readers, it might also help if you offer a definition of historical materialism, which I take generally to refer to Marxist modes of historical analysis. Practically speaking, this would refer to historians who study the past by asking questions about the material resources that go into production and the relationships that develop within a society as it organizes itself to produce material things.

Within the field of history itself, I'd say the biggest name that might be attached to historical materialism is the late great Eric Hobsbawm. His autobiography Interesting Times (2002) gives a very human perspective on what it meant to be a historian and a Marxist in the 20th century. There was a period in the mid-century where faith in social and scientific progress actually made it fairly easy to study history in terms of social relations and the material bases of production. But as Hobsbawm found out, growing hostility to the USSR and its own homemade brand of Marxism made it difficult to speak about these things out loud, meaning that very few scholars were willing to discuss these approaches openly.

Then in the 1970s, there was a big turn in the historical field to studying discourse and language, the so-called linguistic or cultural turn. If earlier works of historical materialism could be easily dismissed as vulgar Marxism and technological determinism (such as Lynn White's famous argument that the stirrup was the catalyst for feudalization), the linguistic turn was something completely different. But even here, Marxist emphases on ideology and class struggle remained largely in vogue, albeit in very non-Marxian ways such as in the landmark works by Foucault (so Marx's ideas, but not as Marx would have used them). Arguably, even Derrida's famous axiom that 'There is nothing outside the text' (Il n'ya pas de hors texte) is inevitably a materialist mode of analysis, since texts are necessarily material things. But here we might be pushing the possible meanings of 'historical materialism' to their very edge.

More recently, I think we're seeing new developments in the discipline that might also be associated with historical materialism. For example, the rise of environmental history is attracting some really great writers, and historians are even thinking about how humanity as a whole is reshaping its global environment in what some are now calling the age of the anthropocene. But although I think these studies are in some ways distant descendants of Marx's thought, Marx himself figures barely if at all in these conversations. And if by historical materialism you mean a narrow definition of how material factors cause historical change, then I think you'll find few historians who discussed material factors alone, even in the heyday of academic Marxism.