Unfortunately, biblatex-historian has last been updated in 2010 and does not seem to be actively maintained any more. biblatex has progressed quite a bit in the last five years and so getting biblatex-historian to work without rough edges becomes increasingly complicated.
In biblatex version 3.3, the name formatting has been revised quite substantially (see https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/372, Biblatex 3.3 name formatting), so many styles released before March 2016 will have problems with newer biblatex versions. Depending on the commands used this can cause biblatex to silently ignore certain modifications, issue harmless warnings or fatal errors.
The biblatex-philosophy style family is very actively maintained (version 1.9 is dated 2016-11-26) and its philosophy-verbose style allows for footnote citations. This style family implements many additional options for a finer and more comfortable control over lots of features.
As an alternative you can use biblatex-chicago (version 1.0rc1 is from 2016-06-07). Turabian style, which is what biblatex-historian implements, and the Chicago Manual of Style are closely related and differ only in details. There are going to be subtle differences though, and since biblatex-chicago is purpose-built to follow the CMS it might not to be too easy to get the exact output of biblatex-historian. See an example of the chicago-note style here.
Another style for the humanities is biblatex-dw. It has been updated to version 1.7 recently (2016-12-06) and now works with the current versions of biblatex. You can see an example of the footnote-dw style here.
Finally there are biblatex's standard styles, footnote styles are called verbose-.... The style verbose-inote as well as the verbose-trad1, verbose-trad2 and verbose-trad3 styles could fit the bill. Using the standard styles offers the advantage of easy customisability, they are also guaranteed to keep up with biblatex's development.
verbose/verbose-ibid/verbose-inotestyles? What you now seem to want is quite easy to modify from these, I imagine. But I suspect there might be some more rules you need/want to follow. For a starter on how to modify a style see Guidelines for customizing biblatex styles. – moewe Mar 04 '15 at 06:56biblatex-historiansays it follows Turabian which in turn is based on Chicago, so you might want to trybiblatex-chicagowhich is under active development. Keep in mind though that it is often easier to modify standard styles then heavily-tailored styles such as CMS. – moewe Mar 04 '15 at 07:07verbose-inotecomes closest tobiblatex-historian. In order to get small caps, you will want\renewcommand*{\mkbibnamelast}[1]{\textsc{#1}}. The rest seems to almost be in order (maybe this is missing). – moewe Mar 05 '15 at 11:20verbose-inoteis a standard style that comes withbiblatex, sostyle=verbose-inoteas option should suffice (as in\usepackage[style=verbose-inote,backend=biber]{biblatex}). – moewe Mar 10 '15 at 14:33biblatexand Biber match in their versions: see table 1 on page 6 of thebiblatexdocumentation) – moewe Mar 11 '15 at 15:33biber --cachebut actually have no idea where on my mac I have to write this command. Posting this here since I'm too newbie to be allowed to comment in the biblatex topic mentioned above. – Password Mar 16 '15 at 22:16biber --cachein the Terminal (command line) see here how to find it. But this really only helps if you get an obscure error along the lines ofrecode_data.xml not found. – moewe Mar 16 '15 at 22:42par-...folders. – moewe Mar 17 '15 at 05:33shorthandfield might be the way to go. – jon Oct 10 '15 at 18:24