理查德·约翰·埃文斯

理查德·约翰·埃文斯爵士（英语：Sir Richard John Evans，1947年9月29日—）是一位英国历史学家，2008至2014年间担任剑桥大学的钦定历史教授，主攻欧洲特别是德国的近现代史。

代表作

《捍卫历史》（In Defence of History，1997年）

《第三帝国三部曲》（The Third Reich Trilogy），包括：

《第三帝国的到来》（The Coming of the Third Reich，2003年）

《当权的第三帝国》（The Third Reich in Power，2005年）

《战时的第三帝国》（The Third Reich at War，2008年）

《历史的另一种可能》（Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History，2013年）

《竞逐权力：1815-1914》（The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914，《企鹅欧洲史》第七卷，2016年）

《历史中的人生：霍布斯鲍姆传》（Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History，2019年）

《阴谋论中的希特勒：第三帝国与偏执想象》（The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination，2020年）

Sir Richard John Evans (born 29 September 1947) is a British historian of 19th- and 20th-century Europe with a focus on Germany. He is the author of eighteen books, including his three-volume The Third Reich Trilogy (2003–2008). Evans was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge from 2008 until he retired in 2014, and President of Cambridge's Wolfson College from 2010 to 2017. He has been Provost of Gresham College in London since 2014.

Evans was appointed Knight Bachelor for services to scholarship in the 2012 Birthday Honours.

Early life and education

Richard Evans was born at Woodford, Essex, on 29 September 1947, to Ieuan Trefor Evans and Evelyn (Jones) Evans, who both came from Wales. He was educated at Forest School, Jesus College, Oxford (MA), and St Antony's College, Oxford (DPhil). In a 2004 interview, he stated that frequent visits to Wales during his childhood inspired both an interest in history and a sense of "otherness". He said one reason that he was drawn to the study of modern German history in the late 1960s was his identification of parallels between the Vietnam War and German imperialism. He admired the work of Fritz Fischer, whom he credits with inspiring him to study modern German history.

Historian of Germany

German feminism studies

Evans first established his academic reputation with his publications on the German Empire. In the early 1970s, Evans travelled to Germany to research his dissertation, a study of the feminist movement in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. It was later published as The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 in 1976. Evans followed his study of German feminism by another book, The Feminists (1977), which traced the history of the feminist movement in North America, Australasia and Europe from 1840 to 1920.

A theme of both books was the weakness of German middle-class culture and its susceptibility to the appeal of nationalism. Evans argued that both liberalism and feminism failed in Germany for those reasons despite flourishing elsewhere in the Western world.

Evans' main interest is social history, and he is much influenced by the Annales school. He largely agrees with Fischer that 19th-century German social development paved the way for the rise of the Third Reich, but Evans takes pains to point out that many other possibilities could have happened. For Evans, the values of the 19th-century German middle class contained the already germinating seeds of National Socialism.

History from below

Evans studied under Fischer in Hamburg in 1970 and 1971 but came to disagree with the "Bielefeld School" of historians, who argued for the Sonderweg thesis that saw the roots of Germany's political development in the first half of the 20th century in a "failed bourgeois revolution" in 1848. Following a contemporary trend that opposed the previous "great man" theory of history, Evans was a member of a group of young British historians who in the 1970s sought to examine German history during the German Empire "from below". These scholars highlighted "the importance of the grass-roots of politics and the everyday life and experience of ordinary people". "History is about people, and their relationships. It's about the perennial question of 'how much free will do people have in building their own lives, and making a future", Evans has said. He says he supported the creation of a "new school of people's history", which was a result of a trend that "has taken place across a whole range of historical subjects, political opinions, and methodological approaches and has been expressed in many different ways".