Richard Overy

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British historian (born 1947)

title: "Richard Overy" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1947-births", "living-people", "academics-of-king's-college-london", "academics-of-the-university-of-exeter", "alumni-of-gonville-and-caius-college,-cambridge", "british-military-historians", "british-military-writers", "fellows-of-churchill-college,-cambridge", "fellows-of-king's-college-london", "fellows-of-queens'-college,-cambridge", "fellows-of-the-british-academy", "fellows-of-the-royal-historical-society", "historians-of-fascism", "historians-of-nazism", "british-historians-of-world-war-ii", "wolfson-history-prize-winners"] description: "British historian (born 1947)" topic_path: "history" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Overy" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary British historian (born 1947) ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox person"]

FieldValue
honorific_prefixProfessor
nameRichard Overy
honorific_suffix
imageRichard Overy.JPG
image_size225px
captionOvery lecturing at King's College London in 2015
birth_nameRichard James Overy
birth_date
death_date
nationalityBritish
alma_materGonville and Caius College, Cambridge
occupationHistorian
employerUniversity of Exeter
known_forStudies on military history, especially the Second World War
creditsWhy the Allies Won, The Air War: 1939–1945
::

| honorific_prefix = Professor | name = Richard Overy | honorific_suffix = | image = Richard Overy.JPG | image_size = 225px | alt = | caption = Overy lecturing at King's College London in 2015 | birth_name = Richard James Overy | birth_date = | birth_place = | death_date = | death_place = | nationality = British | alma_mater = Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge | occupation = Historian | era = | employer = University of Exeter | known_for = Studies on military history, especially the Second World War | credits = Why the Allies Won, The Air War: 1939–1945

Richard James Overy (born 23 December 1947) is a British historian who has published on the history of World War II and Nazi Germany. In 2007, as The Times editor of Complete History of the World, he chose the 50 key dates of world history.

Life and career

Overy, after being educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and becoming a research fellow at Churchill College, taught history at Cambridge from 1972 to 1979, as a fellow of Queens' College and from 1976 as a university assistant lecturer. He moved to King's College London, where he became professor of modern history in 1994. He was appointed to a professorship at the University of Exeter in 2004.

In 2021, Overy helped to curate objects for displays in the Imperial War Museum's Second World War galleries. Some of these objects included flight goggles and a leather helmet once used by Billy Strachan.

Dispute with Timothy Mason

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Billy_Strachan_IWM_display.jpg" caption="A museum display created by Overy in the [[Imperial War Museum]] featuring objects once belonging to [[Billy Strachan]]."] ::

In the late 1980s, Overy was involved in a historical dispute with Timothy Mason that mostly played out on the pages of Past & Present over the reasons for the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Mason had contended that a "flight into war" had been imposed on Adolf Hitler by a structural economic crisis, which confronted Hitler with the choice of making difficult economic decisions or aggression. Overy argued against Mason's thesis by maintaining that though Germany was faced with economic problems in 1939, their extent cannot explain aggression against Poland and the outbreak of war was caused by the Nazi leadership. For Overy, the problem with Mason's thesis was that it rested on assumptions that were not shown by records, information that was passed on to Hitler about Germany's economic problems.

Overy argued that there was a difference between economic pressures induced by the problems of the Four Year Plan and economic motives to seize raw materials, industry and foreign reserves of neighbouring states as a way of accelerating the Four Year Plan. Overy asserted that the repressive capacity of the German state as a way of dealing with domestic unhappiness was somewhat downplayed by Mason. Finally, Overy argued that there is considerable evidence that Germany felt that it could master the economic problems of rearmament; as one civil servant put it in January 1940, "we have already mastered so many difficulties in the past, that here too, if one or other raw material became extremely scarce, ways and means will always yet be found to get out of a fix".

Awards and honours

In media

Publications

  • William Morris, Viscount Nuffield (1976), .
  • The Air War: 1939–1945 (1980), .
  • The Nazi Economic Recovery, 1932–1938 (1982), .
  • Goering: The "Iron Man" (1984), .
  • All Our Working Lives (with Peter Pagnamenta, 1984), .
  • The Origins of The Second World War, edited by Patrick Finney, London: Edward Arnold, Hodder Education Publishers (1997), Third Edition (2008) .
  • Co-written with Timothy Mason: "Debate: Germany, 'Domestic Crisis' and War in 1939", pp. 200–240 in Past and Present, Number 122, February 1989; reprinted as "Debate: Germany, 'Domestic Crisis' and the War in 1939" in The Origins of The Second World War (1997).
  • The Road to War (with Andrew Wheatcroft, 1989), .
  • The Inter-War Crisis, 1919–1939 (1994), .
  • War and Economy in the Third Reich (1994), .
  • Why the Allies Won (1995), .
  • The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich (1996), .
  • The Times Atlas of the Twentieth Century (ed., 1996), .
  • Bomber Command, 1939–45 (1997), .
  • Russia's War: Blood upon the Snow (1997), . There was a companion 10-part television documentary series.
  • The Times History of the 20th Century (1999), .
  • The Battle (2000), (republished as The Battle of Britain: The Myth and the Reality).
  • Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (2001), (republished as Interrogations: Inside the Minds of the Nazi Elite).
  • Germany: A New Social and Economic History. Vol. 3: Since 1800 (ed. with Sheilagh Ogilvie, 2003), .
  • The Times Complete History of the World (6th ed., 2004), .
  • The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (2004), .
  • Collins Atlas of Twentieth Century History (2005), .
  • Imperial War Museum's Second World War Experience Volume 1: Blitzkrieg (2008), .
  • Imperial War Museum's Second World War Experience Volume 2: Axis Ascendant (2008), .
  • 1939: Countdown to War (2009), .
  • The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (2009), .
  • The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 (2013), (later published as The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940–1945, ).
  • A History of War in 100 Battles (2014), .
  • RAF: The Birth of the World's First Air Force (2018),
  • Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931–1945 (2021),
  • Why War? (2024),
  • Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan (2025),

References

References

  1. Overy, Richard. (19 October 2007). "The 50 key dates of world history". [[The Times]].
  2. "Professor Richard Overy".
  3. (11 October 2021). "University of Exeter expert advises on Imperial War Museums' ground-breaking new Second World War and Holocaust exhibition". University of Exeter.
  4. Mason, Tim, & R. J. Overy, "Debate: Germany, 'domestic crisis' and the war in 1939", in ''The Origins of The Second World War'', edited by Patrick Finney, London, United Kingdom: Edward Arnold, 1997, p. 102
  5. Overy, Richard (1999), "Germany, 'Domestic Crisis' and War in 1939", in Christian Leitz (ed.), ''The Third Reich'', Oxford; Blackwell, pp. 117–118
  6. Overy (1999), "Germany, 'Domestic Crisis' and War in 1939", in ''The Third Reich'', p. 108
  7. "Samuel Eliot Morison Prize previous winners". Society for Military History.
  8. "The 2005 Wolfson History Prize Winners".
  9. "PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize - PEN Prizes".
  10. Cragg, Claudia. (11 November 2010). "Chatting Up A Storm with Claudia Cragg".

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