History is nothing if not an attempt to explain things-if you don’t do this, you’re a mere chronicler.

This is different from the postmodernist current that argues for a multitude of explanations for events. My sense in reading your work is you approach history from the stand of sorting things out, attempting a coherent explanation of things. And the disciplinary turmoil of the decade made me acutely aware of the many different ways in which one could do history, and the various approaches used by historians to reconcile grand theory with deep empirical research. Taken together, these times shaped my development as a historian by giving me an abiding interest in the history of ordinary people and how it intersected with the big issues like democracy and dictatorship, war and peace, hierarchy and equality, authority and obedience, and how and why progressive movements of social and political reform rose and fell. At the same time, the rise of neo-fascist movements and anti-immigrant racism, along with the Vietnam War, were deeply disturbing and required serious analysis. History was no longer an élite preoccupation, as the History Workshop movement showed (and I took part in all the early annual Workshops). There was a sense of liberation, both personally and in terms of the discipline of history, as a multitude of new approaches came to the fore, from the Annales school and the English Marxist historians to German social-science history, quantification and demography, and more besides. “1968” and the Sixties more generally are one of those moments that shape a distinctive generation: in my case, largely left-wing, optimistic, forward-looking. How did those times shape your development as a historian? You came of age amid the turmoil of the 1960s.

Aaron Leonard recently conducted an interview with him via email to discuss his development as a scholar, the job of the historian, and recent controversies. More recently he has been sharply critical of historian Timothy Snyder’s book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Historian Richard Evans has reshaped the way we look at Hitler and Nazi Germany, especially through his trilogy on the history of the Third Reich.

Richard evans in defence of history