Peter Mandler

Peter Mandler (born 1958) is a British historian and academic specialising in 19th and 20th century British history, particularly cultural history and the history of the social sciences. He is Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.^[1] He is the current President of the Royal Historical Society, having been elected in 2012.^[2]

Early life

Mandler was born in 1958 in the United States of America.^[3] After attending Magdalen College, Oxford, as an undergraduate, Mandler did his PhD at Harvard where he wrote a dissertation entitled Liberalism and Paternalism: The Whig Aristocracy and the Condition of England, 1830–1852.

Academic career

Before joining the history faculty at Cambridge, he worked at Princeton and London Guildhall University.

Mandler supports popular, public history as expressed by Simon Schama, Linda Colley and Niall Ferguson over the narrow, specialist study of the discipline.^[4] He occasionally makes television and radio appearances himself.^[5]

He is currently working on a book about the anthropologist Margaret Mead and anthropology's move from the study of "simple, primitive" to "complex, modern" culture.

Works

• The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (2006)
• Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (ed., 2006)
• History and National Life (2002)
• The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997)
• After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (ed., with Susan Pedersen, 1994)
• The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the 19th-Century Metropolis (ed., 1990)
• Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform (1990)

References

External links

• University of Cambridge faculty page
• Review of Mandler's book The English National Character, from the Guardian
• Review of History and National Life at the Institute of Historical Research
• Article on The English National Character in the New York Sun