Arthur Marder

Arthur Jacob Marder (born March 8, 1910 in Boston , Massachusetts , † December 25, 1980 in Santa Barbara , California ) was an American historian. Marder was best known for his work on the history of the British Navy, in particular his multi-volume History of the Royal Navy. From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow is considered a standard work of historical research.

Life

Marder was born in Boston in 1910 as the son of the tailor Maxwell J. Marder and his wife Ida Greenstein. He studied at Harvard University , where he received his doctorate in 1936 with William L. Langer with a thesis on the Haldane Mission of 1912.

Marder taught at the University of Oregon from 1936 to 1938 before returning to Harvard from 1939 to 1941. His first published work appeared in 1940 ( British Naval Policy, 1880-1905 ). Due to the further gloomy international situation and his good knowledge of the German language, Marder worked from 1941 to 1942 in the Office of Strategic Services in Washington DC, where he was mainly employed as an analyst.

Marder then spent the rest of his life as a university scholar and lecturer at the Universities of Hawaii (1944–1964) and Irvine , a new campus of the University of California (1964–1977). Since 1970 he has been a corresponding member of the British Academy . In 1972 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society . An intermediate episode was his work as a George Eastman Professor at Oxford University . The last ten years of his university activity were for Marder, although not a "reactionary", mainly characterized by friction with the student movement and with a new generation of professors whom he felt to be irresponsible, who strained him and hindered his research.

His diligence and thoroughness, coupled with a catchy narrative style and the ability to write precise descriptions without bulkiness, were, according to John Horsfield (ODoNB), the main reasons that enabled Marder to deliver some "extraordinary historical work".

After his retirement in 1977, Marder left Orange County with his wife Jan North, whom he married in 1955, and moved to Montecito, where he died in December 1980 at his home on Woodland Drive, Santa Barbara.

Works

In 1952 Marder published Portrait of an Admiral: the Life and Papers of Sir Herbert Richmond , a biography which he obtained as a result of his meeting with Herbert Richmond - whom he had originally approached in connection with a project on a work on John Fisher - and taking into account wrote his private diaries. This was followed by the three-volume monumental biography Fear God and Dread Nought from 1952 to 1959 which , based on Fisher's correspondence and private papers, traced the life of the extravagant admiral.

Marder's major work From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow finally appeared in five bulky tapes in the nine years from 1961 to 1970. In it he describes the history of the British Navy in the first twenty years of the 20th century, starting with the construction of the dreadnought battleships in the last years before the First World War , and ending with the self-sinking of the German deep sea fleet in the bay of Scapa Flow in 1919.

This was followed by From the Dardanelles to Oran (1974) and Operation Menace (1976). His project of a parallel history of the British and Japanese fleets in World War II remained unfinished because of his pancreatic cancer. Only the first volume of the three-part work, Old Friends, New Enemies , could still be completed by himself and published posthumously in 1981. The second volume was completed by his former students John Horsfield and Mark Jacobsen on the basis of the working materials collected by Marder and published in 1990.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed July 4, 2020 . 
2. ↑ Member History: Arthur J. Marder. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 15, 2018 .