Asa Briggs (1921-2016)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4494023 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Eileen Janes Yeo (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 84 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 306-312 |
| Publication date | 2017-10-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History Workshop Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/hwj/dbx043 |
| OpenAlex | W2745335025 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 2 |
In 1969, when Asa Briggs was in the middle of his ‘reign’ at the University of Sussex, I was in a minibus taking Sussex students to the first Ruskin History Workshop. Both were connected in a way because Asa played a significant role in democratizing educational life and in shaping historical study. Rather than explore Briggs’s contribution to social history (a job Rohan McWilliam has done very well elsewhere).1 I take a more personal approach here and use my acquaintance with Asa and his work to consider his relevance to socialist and feminist history and to democratic education. Asa Briggs was the proverbial ‘scholarship boy’. Born in Keighley, West Yorkshire, his father was a skilled engineer and his mother from a shopkeeping family which had been forced off the land. He attended Keighley grammar school and went on to read history at Cambridge but also, wanting to break beyond disciplinary boundaries, studied economics at the same time at the LSE (gaining first-class honours in both!). During World War Two, he joined Hut Six at Bletchley Park and worked alongside codebreakers like Alan Turing. After the War he took up a fellowship at Worcester College Oxford.
Discipline · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Reign · Relevance (law) · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Classics · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · History · Law
| Highly cited | No |
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