| Lewis Bernstein Namier |
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Information AboutLewis Bernstein Namier |
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He immigrated to England in 1906 and became a British subject in 1913 . During World War One , he fought as private with 20th Royal Fusiliers in 1914 – 1915 , and then various positions with Propaganda Department ( 1915 – 1917 ), Information Department ( 1917 – 1918 ) and finally with the Foreign Office ( 1918 – 1920 ). At the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919 , Namier served as part of the British delegation. Namier’s area of responsibility at Versailles was Poland . After leaving the government, Namier served at Balliol College ( 1920 – 1921 ) before going into business. Later, Namier who was a long-time Zionist worked as political secretary for the Jewish Agency in Palestine (1929–31). He served as professor at the University Of Manchester from 1931 until his retirement in 1953 . He is best known for his work on Parliament and its composition in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century , which by its very detailed study of individuals caused substantial revision to be made to accounts based on a party system. Namier's best known works were ''The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III'', ''England in The Age of the American Revolution'' and the ''History Of Parliament'' series he edited later in his life. Namier used Prosopography or collective biography of every MP and peer who sat in the British Parliament in later the 18th Century to reveal that local interests, not national ones, often determined how parliamentarians voted. Namier felt that prosopographical methods were the best ones for analyzing small groups like the House Of Commons , but was opposed to the application of prosopography on larger groups. In addition, Namier used other sources such as wills and tax records to reveal the interests of the MPs. In his time, Namier's methods were innovative and were quite controversial. Namier's obsession with collecting facts such as club membership of various MPs and then attempting to co-relate them to voting patterns led his critics to accuse him of "taking ideas out of history". He also wrote on European history, and his later books ''Europe in Decay'', ''In the Nazi Era'' and ''Diplomatic Prelude'' unsparing condemned the Third Reich and Appeasement . As someone born Jewish (Namier had converted to Anglicanism ), Namier was horrified by The Holocaust and his writings on German history have criticized for Germanophobia . Like the work of his friend Sir John Wheeler-Bennett , Namier's Diplomatic Histories are generally not well regarded by historians today largely because Namier was content to condemn appeasement without seeking to explain the reasons for it. He was married twice and knighted in 1952 . Namier held very Right-wing views, and has been called the most Reactionary British historian of his generation. Ironically, Namier’s principal protégé was the left-wing historian A.J.P. Taylor . Some evidence put the guilt on Lewis Bernstein Namier for probably unauthorised altering in the British Foreign Ministry of the Curzon Line , so that it did not include then the third most important Polish city of Lwów on the Polish side. This fact had great influence on the negotiations about the Polish eastern border on the peace conferences in Teheran and Yalta . WORK
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SEE ALSO John Brooke |
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