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Conyers Read

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
American historian (1881–1959)
Conyers Read
Born(1881-04-25)April 25, 1881
DiedDecember 24, 1959(1959-12-24) (aged 78)
Alma materHarvard University
Balliol College, Oxford
AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship (1951, 1954)

Conyers Read (April 25, 1881 – December 24, 1959) was an American historian who specialized in theHistory of England in the 15th and 16th centuries. A professor of history at the universities ofChicago andPennsylvania, he was president of theAmerican Historical Association for the year 1949–1950.

InWorld War I Read served with theAmerican Red Cross and inWorld War II he joined theOffice of Strategic Services.

Early life

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The son of William Franklin Read, a textile manufacturer,[1] by his marriage to Victoria Eliza Conyers, Read was the seventh in a family of eight children and was born atPhiladelphia in 1881.[2][3] He was educated there at theCentral High School, from which he graduated in 1899, and then atHarvard, where he graduatedABsumma cum laude in 1903.[2][4] He next studied modern history atBalliol College,Oxford, where he graduatedB.Litt,[2] before returning to Harvard to take aPh.D. in 1908.[5][6]

Career

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Read's first academic post was as a lecturer at Harvard.[7] After a year atPrinceton (1909–1910),[6] from 1910 to 1920 he taught at theUniversity of Chicago as an associate professor, then as a professor, interrupted duringWorld War I by service with theAmerican Red Cross.[1] In 1920 he returned to Philadelphia to join the family textile firm of William F. Read & Sons, in which he was general manager from 1927, then president from 1930 to 1933. Although no longer teaching at Chicago, he remained a non-resident professor of the university,[1] and in 1932 he succeededDexter Perkins as executive secretary of theAmerican Historical Association.[8] In 1934 he returned to academia as a Professor of English History at theUniversity of Pennsylvania.[1][9]

Read's first major research project was his edition of the Bardon Papers, documents relating to the imprisonment and trial ofMary, Queen of Scots, published in London in theCamden Series in 1909.[10] In 1925 he published the monumentalMr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth in three volumes,[11] described in theAmerican Historical Review as "the ripe fruition of upwards of two decades of exhaustive research".[12]

Before the entry of the United States intoWorld War II, Read chaired the Pennsylvania branch of theCommittee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. In 1941 he was employed by theOffice of the Coordinator of Information, which meant spending the academic year 1941–1942 inWashington D.C. There he was lead officer of theBritish Empire section of theOffice of Strategic Services research and analysis branch,[1] predecessor of theCIA, for which task he was recruited by his fellow Harvard historianWilliam L. Langer.

In 1949, at the time of theCold War, Read was elected president of the American Historical Association, and his presidential address was widely reported. In it, he said the United States needed a militant attitude to survive and called for more discipline. He also sought to enlist historians in the fight againsttotalitarianism.[13] In his call to action, he listed those to be resisted: "theThomist, theFascist, theNazi, theCommunist".[14] He said:

Confronted by such alternatives as Mussolini and Hitler and last of all Stalin have imposed, we must clearly assume a militant attitude if we are to survive... Discipline is the essential prerequisite of every effective army, whether it marches under the Stars and Stripes or under the Hammer and Sickle...Total war, whether it be hot or cold, enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part. The historian is no freer from this obligation than the physicist... This sounds like the advocacy of one form of social control as against another. In short, it is... There is no menace to essential freedoms in this concept of control. Quite the contrary. It simply recognizes the fact that freedom can survive only if it goes hand in hand with a deep sense of social responsibility, particularly among those whose business is education in any form and at any level.[15][16]

This address was later printed in theAmerican Historical Review under the title 'Social responsibilities of the historian'.[17] When the progressiveMerle Curti became president of the association in 1954, he directly challenged the position taken up by Read and his successorSamuel Eliot Morison, in an address whichGeorge Rawick called "one of the most remarkable experiences of my life".[18] In his autobiography, published after Read's death,Dexter Perkins said of Read that "he molded history to promote his convictions".[8]

In 1950, Read commented on the fact that history was increasingly being written for small numbers of specialists and was ignored by most other academics, let alone the general reading public. He blamed "little pedants" who did not have "the courage to attempt history in the grand manner".[19]

Read retired in 1951 and wasawarded aGuggenheim Fellowship, which he held for two years.[6] This was to support the writing of a new biography ofWilliam Cecil (1520–1598).[20] The first volume of the work was published in 1955 asMr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth[21] and was awarded aFolger Shakespeare Library prize worth $1,000.[1] The second volume was published posthumously in 1960 asLord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth.

Private life

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In 1910 Read married as his first wife Edith C. Kirk, a daughter of Dr Edward C. Kirk, an academic of the University of Pennsylvania, and they had three children: Elizabeth (1912–1999), William F. Read III (1915–1996) and Edward C. K. Read (1918–1998). Read married secondly Evelyn Plummer (1901–1991).[1] His postal address in 1948 was "Mt. Moro Rd., P.O. Box 593,Villanova,Pa."[22] He died at home in Villanova on December 23,[23] 1959.[3]

Honours

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Selected publications

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  • The Bardon Papers: Documents relating to the imprisonment and trial of Mary, Queen of Scots (London: Camden Society, 1909)
  • 'Walsingham and Burghley in Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council' inThe English Historical Review, vol. XXVIII (1913), pp. 34–58
  • England and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918)
  • Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1925), 3 vols.
  • Bibliography of British History, Tudor Period, 1485–1603 (1933; second edition, Rowman and Littlefield, 1978)
  • 'A Letter from Robert, Earl of Leicester, to a Lady', inThe Huntington Library Bulletin No. 9 (April 1936)
  • The Tudors: personalities and practical politics in sixteenth century England (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1936)
  • The Constitution Reconsidered (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938)
  • Social and Political Forces in the English Reformation (The Rockwell Lectures,Rice Institute) (Houston, Texas: Elsevier, 1953)
  • Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955)
  • The Government of England under Elizabeth (Folger Booklets on Tudor and Stuart Civilization, 1959)
  • Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth Published posthumously (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960)

Notes

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  1. ^abcdefghijklConyers Read, 1881–1959, Papers, 1892 - c. 1952 at archives.upenn.edu, accessed 30 June 2013
  2. ^abcConyers Read, 1881–1959: Scholar, Teacher, Public Servant (1963), p. 51
  3. ^ab'Read, Dr. Conyers', inThe New International Year Book (1960), p. 537
  4. ^The President's Report (Harvard University, 1904), p. 143
  5. ^Harvard Alumni Bulletin (vol. 13, 1910), p. 417
  6. ^abc'READ, Conyers, educator', inThe National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (James Terry White, 1965), p. 54
  7. ^The Athenaeum, Issues 4210–4235 (1908), p. 186
  8. ^abDexter Perkins,Yield of the Years: an autobiography (Little, Brown, 1969), p. 71
  9. ^Richard L. Greaves,Elizabeth I, Queen of England (1974), p. 120 (note)
  10. ^J. Franklin Jameson, Henry E. Bourne,Robert Livingston Schuyler, eds.,American Historical Review (1911), p. 895
  11. ^Conyers Read, ed.,Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1925), 3 vols
  12. ^'Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, by Conyers Read', review inAmerican Historical Review vol. 31, No. 4 (July, 1926),pp. 766–769 at jstor.org, accessed 30 June 2013
  13. ^Anthony Molho,Gordon Stewart Wood,Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton University Press, 1998),p. 279
  14. ^James Claude Malin,On the Nature of History: Essays about History and Dissidence (Lawrence, Kansas, 1954), p. 281: "And note Read's enumeration of totalitarian ideologies against which he issued the call to action: "the Thomist, the Fascist, the Nazi, the Communist," and others."
  15. ^Conyers Read,The Social Responsibilities of the Historian (1949) at historians.org, accessed 1 July 2013
  16. ^Noam Chomsky,The Culture of Terrorism (1988), p. 2
  17. ^Conyers Read, 'Social responsibilities of the historian', inAmerican Historical Review vol. 55 (1950); noted in William L. Langer et al.,Conyers Read, 1881–1959: Scholar, Teacher, Public Servant (M. and V. Dean, 1963, at p. 51
  18. ^Matthew Levin,Cold War University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties (2013),p. 83
  19. ^David Eldridge,Hollywood's History Films (I. B. Tauris, 2006),p. 174
  20. ^The Publishers Weekly vol. 159 (1951), p. 1789
  21. ^Penry Williams,The Later Tudors: England, 1547–1603 (1995), p. 566
  22. ^Harvard Alumni Directory (Harvard Alumni Association, 1948), p. 1795
  23. ^"Conyers Read".historians.org. Retrieved2016-08-18.
  24. ^"APS Member History".search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved2023-06-13.
  25. ^"Conyers Read".American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 2023-02-09. Retrieved2023-06-13.

Further reading

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  • Norton Downs, ed.,Essays in Honor of Conyers Read (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)
  • William L. Langeret al.,Conyers Read, 1881–1959: Scholar, Teacher, Public Servant (M. and V. Dean, 1963; 52 pp.)

External links

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