C. L. Mowat Explained

Charles Loch Mowat (4 October 1911  - 23 June 1970) was a British-born American historian.^[1]

Biography

Mowat was educated at Marlborough College and St John's College, Oxford.^[2] In 1934 he emigrated to the United States, where he became an American citizen.^[2] From 1934 until 1936 he taught at the University of Minnesota. In 1936 he took up a position at the University of California, Los Angeles.^[3] His opposition to McCarthyism led to him leaving UCLA and taking a post at the University of Chicago in 1950.^[2] In 1958 he returned to Britain to be professor of history at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, a post he held until 1958.^[2]

His best known book is Britain Between the Wars, which became the standard text on the nation's interwar period.^[2] A. J. P. Taylor wrote the volume in the Oxford History of England covering 1914 - 1945. After he was asked how he found out what basically happened in the period, Taylor answered: "I looked it up in Mowat".^[4]

Works

• East Florida as a British Province, 1763-84 (1943).
• Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940 (1955).
• The Charity Organisation Society, 1869–1913 (1961).
• The Golden Valley Railway (1964).

Notes

1. The Times (29 June 1970), p. 10.
2. [John Ramsden (historian)|John Ramsden]
3. 'Obituary: Charles Loch Mowat', The Florida Historical Quarterly Vol. 49, No. 3 (Jan., 1971), p. 330.
4. Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783-1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 671.