Richard J. Evans is one of the world’s leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947.
From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2020 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He served as Provost of Gresham College in the City of London from 2014 to 2020.
In 1994 he was awarded the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and in 2015 received the British Academy Leverhulme Medal, awarded every three years for a significant contribution to the Humanities or Social Sciences.
In 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial.
His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.
Books in order of publication:
The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933, London: SAGE, 1976.
The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia, 1840–1920, London: Croom Helm, 1977.
The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Germany, London: C. Helm; Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981.
Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Origins of the Third Reich, London: Allen and Unwin, 1987.
Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism, and Pacifism in Europe, 1870–1945, Brighton, Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German History, London: Routledge, 1988.
In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past. London: I.B. Tauris. 1989.
Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest, and the Working Class in Germany Before the First World War, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.
The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century London: Routledge, 1991.
Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600–1987, London: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification, 1800–1996, London: Routledge, 1997.
Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
In Defence of History, London: Granta Books, 1997; rev. edn. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999; edn. with extensive new afterword, London: Granta, 2000.
Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, New York: Basic Books, 2001; published in the United Kingdom as Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial, London: Verso, 2002.
The Coming of the Third Reich, London: Allen Lane, 2003.
The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939, London: Allen Lane, 2005.
The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster, London: Allen Lane, 2008.
Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History, Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2013.
The Third Reich in History and Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914, London: Allen Lane, 2016.
Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, London: Little, Brown, 2019.
The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press; London: Allen Lane, 2020
Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, London: Allen Lane, 2024.
Oak Lawn Library Friends 