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Videotaped Interviews with British Historians, 1985–1998

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2017

Roger Adelson  and
Russell Smith
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Extract

There is an important collection of videotaped interviews with British historians that is now available in London. The Publications Department of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) has produced twenty-eight videotaped interviews with prominent historians in Britain. More tapes are to be released with others scheduled for production in the future. The historians who have already been interviewed are senior British historians who have made their scholarly contributions since World War II. All the interviews are conducted by younger colleagues who have specialized in the same or related fields of history. Interviewers explore the influences that have shaped the work of the senior historians and encourage the latter to reflect upon their background, training, publications, and careers. Because the historians are selected by an IHR committee, the members of which are mostly economic historians, senior social and economic historians have been more fully represented in the IHR videotapes than other historians. Of the twenty-eight interviews, fifteen of the historians have written mostly about the modern period (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), eight are historians of the early modern period (from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries), three are medievalists, one is a classicist, and one is a historian of science. Concluding this article is an alphabetical list of all the historians interviewed in this series.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , Summer 1999 , pp. 257 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1998

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References

1 Each interview, lasting approximately 35 minutes, is available in VHS/PAL and VHS/NTSC formats, for £25, which includes postage, packing, and VAT. Orders may be placed with the Publications Secretary, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, Senate House, London WC21E 7HU, England.

2 Letter, dated July 1, 1998, from Jane Winters, Publications Assistant, Institute of Historical Research, London, to Roger Adelson.

3 Curtis, L. P., “Of Images and Imagination in History”; Galbraith, Vivian, “Afterthoughts”; and Pocock, J. G. A., “Working on Ideas in Time,” in The Historian’s Workshop: Original Essays by Sixteen Historians, ed. Curtis, L. P. Jr. (New York, 1970), pp. 245-76, 3-21, and 151–65Google Scholar.

4 Taylor, A. J. P., “Accident Prone, or What Happened Next,” Journal of Modern History 49 (March 1977): 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Recent Historians of Great Britain: Essays on the Post-1945 Generation, ed. Walter L. Arnstein (Ames, Iowa, 1990).

6 “Interview with Peter Calvocoressi,” The Historian 55, 2 (Winter 1993): 235-52; “Interview with Walter L. Arnstein,” Ibid. 57, 3 (Spring 1995): 473-88; “Interview with Robin Higham,” Ibid. 60, 3 (Spring 1998): 473-86. The Arnstein interview has been reproduced in Speaking of History: Conversations with Historian, ed. Roger Adelson (East Lansing, Michigan, 1997), pp. 1-21.

7 Ibid., pp. 165-66.

8 Pocock, J. G. A., “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47 (December 1975): 601–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 During the fall semester, 1997, Roger Adelson used all 26 IHR videotapes for his graduate class in British Historiography at Arizona State University. Several of his colleagues came for certain interviews, but the seven students who took the course for credit discussed both the form and content of all the interviews. The consensus of the class was that approximately half the interviews were good enough that they could recommend them to others. Such criticism is subjective, of course, so the individual IHR videotapes have not been evaluated here.