I wouldn't say that Marxist history isn't popular, it's just that today a historian is less likely to label themselves Marxist. There aren't many historians today that would fully subscribe to the idea that "all history is the history of the class struggle" (Communist Manifesto). We tend to think more intersectionally about history these days, looking at gender, ethnicity, age etc... as well as class (https://kclintfemsoc.wordpress.com/2014/01/08/a-brief-history-of-intersectionality-and-the-question-of-class/). However there are plenty of recent approaches to history that are certainly inspired by the Marxist, or "history from below" approach.

One of the most enduring legacies of Marxist history is that we still consider studying the "working class" as a useful way of looking at history.

There is a journal (http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/journal) and conference for the study of historical materialism, which is a form of history that puts people's work and jobs at the centre, focusing on telling people's stories through what they made.

A growing theme in historiography is the idea of looking at "resistance" in history, and many of the studies of this draw on Marxism. Howard Caygills book "On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance" from 2013 has more on this (although more philosophy at times than history perhaps).

Although it may be a little dated now Stuart Hall's book "Resistance Through Rituals" draws heavily on Marxist theory in its discussion of youth subculture. More recently there's Stephen Duncombe's "Cultural Resistance Reader" (2002) which is a collection of texts for thinking about cultural resistance, many of which draw upon Marxist theories.

Part of the problem with evaluating the state of Marxism, or perhaps more accurately, Marxian analysis (/u/TenMinuteHistory does a good job distinguishing the two in this thread), within the academy is that Marxism is a very diverse intellectual field. It becomes very hard to peg scholars as Marxist unless one is familiar with the theoretical backgrounds and disciplinary context of their work. Marxian analysis in history has shifted and adapted to various "turns" in theory and did not come through the process unscathed. The result was a Marxism that was very different than its nineteenth-century forebearers that incorporates various other disciplines that do not easily fit into prior models of historical materialism. Even in the state-mandated vulgar Marxist history of the Eastern bloc, scholars still produced some very sophisticated works behind the Iron Curtain. For example, GDR historians' research into the social conflicts and class nature of the Reformation were important in wrenching this period away from the hands of theologians and shifting attention away from Luther and other rarefied elite sources. Marxian analysis is very much alive in the academy today as one of the tools available to historians. In one of the Monday Methods threads, Marxism and Hegemony, /u/commiespaceinvader outlines the one aspect of contemporary Marxian analysis (Gramsci) and the thread's discussion highlights the work of other theorists.* Given such diversity of Marxian thought and the faded political importance of vulgar Marxism, it becomes quite easy to fall into the trap of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. If Marxist-inspired works do not quite fit into the popular intellectual preconception of what constitutes real Marxism, then they do not appear to be Marxist. But such a conclusion often has to fly in the face of how various historians' self-identify in terms of theory but also ignore many of the developments in Marxian thought since the middle of the twentieth century.

*and I have to add, I actually rather enjoy reading the Monday Methods threads and that one in particular was quite interesting to read.

Just my .02:

To use one of your examples, Hobsbawn was pushing back with broad explanations instead of narratives about politics and Great Men. Emphasizing economic causation and social consequences, even (or especially) for the small people of the world was radical and iconoclastic.

So, first, it's self-evident today but preferring economic causation over political narratives isn't Marxist. Yesteryear Hobsbawm sort-of-kind-of identified as a Marxist, but with critical distance we can tell he was never a Marxist historian. There's nothing 'Marxist' about studying economic causation--e.g., Milton Friedman's history of the velocity of capital. He was just a good historian, and he fit himself into a category that was available rather than perfect.

Two, in today’s historiographical landscape economic causation appears self-evident, even conservative.

Finally, third, insofar as this isn't an explanation of two, the 'realistic' evaluation of history by Marxism and related fields, like many expressions of 'realism,' became a little unreal in how strenuously they rejected political or other social ideas--religion, race and so on--which Marxism considered 'unreal.'

As Hobsbawm himself pointed out in his obituary for Tony Judt,

Both of us knew that the 20th century can only be understood fully by those who became historians because they lived through it and shared its basic passion: namely the belief that politics was the key to our truths as well as our myths. In spite of our differences, both Tony’s Marxism and the French Left and my own recent How to Change the World are dedicated to the memory of the same independent thinker, the late George Lichtheim.

The three aren't necessarily academic historians, but they do represent, I think, a popular shift towards normalizing the study of history after it had, like a pendulum, swung far away from politics and towards (and maybe this is uncharitable) everything-but-politics. By 2012, even Hobsbawm was plastering over some of the things he might have said earlier by identifying that basic passion of the 20th as a sui generis politics, which, again, is not terribly Marxist.

To boil this down: Marxist history is not popular anymore because it never was Marxist, and once its propagators stopped identifying as Marxists and became, well, anything else at all we stopped referring to it as Marxist even as it continued on. Second, other ways of thinking came about--if we're going to talk about the small people's jobs, why not also their religion and race?

Edit:

As a little addendum, I think there's also something to be said for the Holocaust's status as a unique event in history that, even now, seems so horrible it can't really be explained by Marxist ideas of history in a convincing way. I think we get a little bit of that from Tony Judt and some other thinkers, like Fackenheim and Arendt, and countless others to some greater or lesser extent in other fields (Buber, Baumen). Marxism may have made some sense in the rubble but, again, with critical distance it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense that Nazi Germany would have inflicted so many economic wounds on itself because of race/religious ideas that don't readily adapt themselves to a Marxist worldview.

For this I cite Bauman's entertaining chapter that is, I believe, regularly inflicted by otherwise well meaning professors on undergraduates. 1

I'm a bit baffled that there are different "types" of history. Can somebody explain the concept?