Harold Temperley

This article is about the historian Harold Temperley. For the physicist, see Harold Neville Vazeille Temperley .

Harold William Vazeille Temperley (born April 20, 1879 , † July 11, 1939 ) was a British historian and since 1931 Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University . Temperley was also a Masters of Peterhouse , the oldest of the colleges there, and President of the International Congress of Historians .

Life and Academic Work

After starting an academic career in Cambridge, Temperley worked for the army and government during the First World War and was a member of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 , which was reflected in several publications about the negotiations there and the Balkans question.

Temperley was one of the leading representatives of diplomacy history during the interwar period, which here became a supreme discipline of the subject. Temperley student Herbert Butterfield described him and his colleague Charles Webster decades later as outstanding personalities "like booming giants, cumbersome and dangerous to crockery, bulging with warmth and good feeling, yet capable of overbearingness - terrible lions if you trod on their tales".

He became known for his works on British and international politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries: Temperley advocated a broad study of the original sources at a time when British history was only beginning to establish itself in a modern form. From this perspective his works on the British Foreign Minister George Canning and the editing of the extensive collection of files British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914 , which he edited between 1926 and 1938 together with George Peabody Gooch , left a lasting impression on historiography .

In 1923, Temperley was also the founder of the prestigious journal The Cambridge Historical Journal (since 1958 The Historical Journal ), which is published to this day by Cambridge University Press . Since 1927 he was a member ( fellow ) of the British Academy .

He is the father of the physicist Harold Neville Vazeille Temperley .

Works

• The life of Canning (1905)
• History of Serbia (1917)
• Frederic the Great and Kaiser Joseph: An Episode of War and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth Century (1915)
• A history of the Peace Conference of Paris (6 volumes / 1920–1924)
• The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, 1783-1919 (collaborator / 1922-1923)
• The foreign policy of Canning, 1822-1827 (1925)
• British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914 (1926–1938 / with George Peabody Gooch)
  • I. The end of British isolation
  • II. The Anglo-Japanese alliance and the Franco-British entente
  • III. The testing of the entente, 1904-6
  • IV. The Anglo-Russian rapprochement, 1903-7
  • V. The Near East: The Macedonian problem and the annexation of Bosnia, 1903-9
  • VI. Anglo-German tension: armaments and negotiation, 1907-12
  • VII. The Agadir Crisis
  • VIII. Arbitration, neutrality and security
  • IX.1 The Balkan wars: The prelude. The Tripoli was
  • IX.2 The Balkan wars: The League and Turkey
  • X.1 The Near and Middle East on the eve of war
  • X.2 The last years of peace
  • XI. The outbreak of war
• Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1927 / with AJ Grant )
• England and the Near East: The Crimea (1936)
• Foundations of British foreign policy (1938 / with Lilian M. Penson )
• A Century of Diplomatic Blue Books, 1814–1914 (1938 / with Lilian M. Penson)

literature

• John D. Fair: Harold Temperley: A Scholar and Romantic in the Public Realm, 1879-1939. 1992.
• Entry via Temperley on the Institute of Historical Research website

Individual evidence

1. ^ Herbert Butterfield: Introduction. In: Temperley: The Foreign Policy of Canning 1822-1827. Reprint London 1966, pp. XIII f.
2. ^ Fellows: Harold William Vazeille Temperley. British Academy, accessed August 6, 2020 .