The Coming of the Third Reich

Born in London on September 29, 1947 and coming from a family of Welsh ancestry, Richard J. Evans is a historian of late 19th and early 20th century Germany. He received his MA and DPhil degrees in History from Oxford University. His doctoral thesis was on the history of early German feminist movements, which became the basis of his first book, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894—1933, which was published in 1976. Other major works by Evans include The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia (1977), Comrades and Sisters: Feminism, Socialism, and Pacifism in Europe, 1870—1945 (1987), Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest, and the Working Class in Germany Before the First World War (1990), In Defence of History (1997), Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (2001), and The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815—1914 (2016).

Evans taught history at the University of East Anglia, the University of London, and Cambridge University and was President of Wolfson College at Oxford. After retiring from teaching in 2017, Evans still serves as the President of Gresham College, an institution that offers free public lectures from academics. Evans has received a large number of prizes for his writing over the years, most notably the Wolfson History Prize in 1988, the Civic Medal for Arts and Sciences of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg in 1993, and the British Academy Leverhulme Prize and Medal in 2015.