taylor thesis

Our author reconsiders A.J.P. Taylor and the question his work provokes: Is history just one damned thing after another? Anyone living in England during the 1950s and 1960s who was politically alert knew about A.J.P. (Alan) Taylor. He was that diminutive bow-tied Oxford academic who, with Canon Collins and Michael Foot, marched in protests organized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He was one of the first of the British telly dons, who could stand in front of the camera and pontificate without notes about virtually anything. (One of my favorite Taylor legends has him arriving at the studio in 1953 to give a talk about Napoleon, only to be told of Stalin's death and asked to lecture instead on the life of a very different dictator—which he did, in his unflappable way.) He was the only person who could get Oxford undergraduates out of bed early in the morning—and in vast numbers, to sit in the chilly Examination Schools and listen to him talk (for exactly fifty-five minutes and again without notes) on modern European history.Alan Taylor wrote one of the most enduring works of diplomatic history, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 (1954, and never out of print), yet he also wrote potboilers that swiftly faded from sight and use. His regular opinion pieces for The Guardian, the Daily Herald, and Lord Beaverbrook's newspaper the Sunday Express—polemical articles about why the Germans were inherently bad, and why the Americans would plunge the world into a nuclear war, and why Whitehall bureaucrats were ruining Britain—infuriated his academic colleagues, who ensured that he never received a professorship (a far more exalted position in Britain than in the United States) or a public honor. Whether they resented him because of his radical views, or because he wrote for a middlebrow readership, or because he was so well known to the British public, or.
He was abruptly dismissed as a lecturer at Oxford University in 1962. The assumption was that his views and methods simply did not sit well with a large number of his colleagues; his role as popularizer was viewed with disdain in the British Academy. Best-Known Book Drew Fire ''These criticisms that I popularize history - if it were true I'd be delighted,'' Mr. Taylor said in a 1976 interview. ''My books don't sell well on the whole, and in fact the greatest seller of all is a long introduction to the Communist Manifesto that I wrote for Penguin. So I bless the name of Marx every day for the royalties.'' After the publication in 1961 of his best-known book, ''The Origins of the Second World War,'' Mr. Taylor was sharply, unsparingly attacked by another distinguished British historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who in the view of many critics demolished the book's argument in just about every respect. Mr. Taylor's controversial thesis was that Hitler had not been solely responsible for the war, a view widely at variance with standard interpretations. ''The general moral of this book, so far as it has one, is that Great Britain and France dithered between resistance and appeasement, and so helped to make war more likely,'' Mr. Taylor wrote in the American edition of the book. ''American policy did the same.'' Mr. Taylor stated that ''in principle and doctrine Hitler was no more wicked and unscrupulous than many other contemporary statemen.'' 'Flawed From Top to Bottom' The overall thesis of ''The Origins of the Second World War'' was that Hitler was, in essence, an opportunist. His goal was to make Germany a great world power but, with no clear plan how to do it, he changed with circumstances, stumbling into a war that was in large part brought on by that dithering ''between resistance and appeasement'' that Mr. Taylor saw as the essence of Allied policy. The British.
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First edition The Origins of the Second World War is a non-fiction book by the English historian A. J. P. Taylor, examining the causes of World War II. It was first published in 1961 by Hamish Hamilton. Contents 1 Origins 2 Content 3 Reception 4 Notes 5 References 6 Further reading Origins[edit] Taylor had previously written The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, which covered the period 1848 until 1918. As he later wrote in his autobiography: I wanted to be writing something and decided that I could carry on my diplomatic history from the point where the Struggle for Mastery left off. I had, I thought, done most of the research work needed by reviewing the various books of memoirs and the volumes of German and British diplomatic documents as they came out. At that time no original sources were available: no cabinet minutes or papers, no Chiefs of Staff records, only more or less formal documents from the Foreign Office with very occasional minutes. This extraordinary paucity, as it seems now, makes my book a period piece of limited value.[1] Since 1947 he had read fifteen volumes of British diplomatic documents, eight volumes of German diplomatic documents and one volume of Italian diplomatic documents, all of them covering the 1930s.[2] However he did not read Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf until after he had written the book.[3] Taylor was a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, one of whose arguments was that an unintended war brought about by accident could cause a nuclear war and the end of human civilisation. In Taylor's view if the Second World War could start by accident, so could a Third. He also was opposed to the idea that it was necessary for the Western powers to take a tough stand against the Soviet Union as failure to take a similar stand against Nazi Germany had led to war.[4] Content[edit] Since the war the general view of the causes of the.
The Origins of the Second World War was an approachable, understandable, and freestanding work of understanding the problems, and actions of European statesman following WWI and leading to the beginning of WWII. AJP Taylor tried to return to the interwar period and explain the actions of those during that time as if he did not know the outcome by using correspondence, official policy, and archives.For me, it was fascinating to see just how hectic, chaotic, and unknowable things were back then. I The Origins of the Second World War was an approachable, understandable, and freestanding work of understanding the problems, and actions of European statesman following WWI and leading to the beginning of WWII. AJP Taylor tried to return to the interwar period and explain the actions of those during that time as if he did not know the outcome by using correspondence, official policy, and archives.For me, it was fascinating to see just how hectic, chaotic, and unknowable things were back then. It was a human tale, a tale of ego, philosophies, error, chance, and ass-covering. A battle and gamble between appeasement and conciliation that helped no one.I don't believe this work vindicated anyone, if anything, it showed the folly of all those involved and put blame or whatever you'd like to attribute them to the responsible governments/regimes/statesman.more.
Taylor in 1977 For the medieval historian, see A. J. Taylor. Alan John Percivale Taylor FBA (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was an English historian who specialised in 19th- and 20th-century European diplomacy. Both a journalist and a broadcaster, he became well known to millions through his television lectures. His combination of academic rigour and popular appeal led the historian Richard Overy to describe him as the Macaulay of our age.[1] Contents 1 Life 1.1 Early life 1.2 Academic career 1.3 Manchester years 1.4 Second World War 1.5 Personal life 2 Work 2.1 The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy, 1847–49 2.2 The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 2.3 Biography of Bismarck 2.4 The Origins of the Second World War 2.5 English History 1914–1945 2.6 The Reichstag Fire (introduction) 2.7 War by Timetable 2.8 Biography of Lord Beaverbrook 2.9 Other introductions 2.10 Journalism 2.11 Broadcasting 3 Opinions 3.1 Germanophobia 3.2 Populism 3.3 Irony and humour 3.4 The Establishment 4 Criticisms 4.1 The Origins of the Second World War 4.2 Portrayal of Mussolini 4.3 The French Third Republic 5 Retirement 6 Bibliography 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links Life[edit] Early life[edit] Taylor was born in 1906 in Birkdale near Southport, which was then part of Lancashire. His wealthy parents held left-wing views, which he inherited. Both his parents were pacifists who vocally opposed the First World War, and sent their son to Quaker schools as a way of protesting against the war. He was educated at various Quaker schools including Bootham School[2][3] in York. Geoffrey Barraclough, a contemporary at Bootham School, remembered Taylor as a most arresting, stimulating, vital personality, violently anti-bourgeois and anti-Christian.[4] In 1924, he went to Oriel College, Oxford, to study modern history. In the 1920s, Taylor's mother, Constance.