Kenneth O. Morgan
University of Wales, Aberystwyth | |
---|---|
In office 1989–1995 | |
Preceded by | Gareth Owen |
Succeeded by | Derec Llwyd Morgan |
Personal details | |
Born | 16 May 1934 |
Nationality | Welsh |
Political party | Labour |
Spouses |
|
Alma mater | Oriel College, Oxford |
Occupation | Historian |
Kenneth Owen Morgan, Baron Morgan,
Life
He grew up in rural Wales and attended Aberdovey Council School in rural Wales,
He taught at
In 1983 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy and in 1992 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, and in 2002 of Oriel College. He became a Druid of the Gorsedd of Bards in 2008 and in 2009 received the gold medal from the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion for lifetime achievement. He is also a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.[3]
Politics
Morgan is a member of the Labour Party, and on 12 June 2000 he was made a life peer as Baron Morgan, of Aberdyfi in the County of Gwynedd.[4] He has served on the Lords Select Committee on the Constitution.[5]
Family
He was married to the historian and criminologist Jane Morgan, who died in 1992; they had two children together, David and Katherine. In 2009 he married Elizabeth Gibson, senior lecturer in law at the universities of
Writing
Kenneth Morgan is the author of many works, such as The People's Peace, his notable history of
He also edited the
Labour history
In the 1950s to 1970s,
the ferocity of argument owed more to current politics, the unions’
winter of discontent [in 1979], and rise of a hard-left militant tendency within the world of academic history as well as within the Labour Party. The new history was often strongly Marxist, which fed through the work of brilliant evangelists like Raphael Samuel into the New Left Review, a famous journal like Past and Present, the Society of Labour History and the work of a large number of younger scholars engaged in the field. Non-scholars like Tony Benn joined in. The new influence of Marxism upon Labour studies came to affect the study of history as a whole.[7]
Morgan sees benefits:
In many ways, this was highly beneficial: it encouraged the study of the dynamics of social history rather than a narrow formal institutional view of labour and the history of the Labour Party; it sought to place the experience of working people within a wider technical and ideological context; it encouraged a more adventurous range of sources, ‘history from below’ so-called, and rescued them from what Thompson memorably called the ‘condescension of posterity’; it brought the idea of class centre-stage in the treatment of working-class history, where I had always felt it belonged; it shed new light on the poor and dispossessed for whom the source materials were far more scrappy than those for the bourgeoisie, and made original use of popular evidence like oral history, not much used before.[8]
Morgan tells of the downside as well:
But the Marxist – or sometimes Trotskyist – emphasis in Labour studies was too often doctrinaire and intolerant of non-Marxist dissent–it was also too often plain wrong, distorting the evidence within a narrow doctrinaire framework. I felt it incumbent upon me to help rescue it. But this was not always fun. I recall addressing a history meeting in Cardiff...when, for the only time in my life, I was subjected to an incoherent series of attacks of a highly personal kind, playing the man not the ball, focusing on my accent, my being at Oxford and the supposedly reactionary tendencies of my empiricist colleagues.[8]
Works
- David Lloyd George, Welsh Radical as World Statesman (1963)
- Wales in British Politics, 1868–1922 (1963, rev ed 1992) online
- Freedom or Sacrilege (1966)
- The Age of Lloyd George (1971)
- (ed.) Lloyd George, Family Letters (1973)
- Lloyd George (1974)
- Keir Hardie, Radical and Socialist (1975) online[
- Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government 1918–1922 (1979) online
- (jointly with Jane Morgan) Portrait of a Progressive (1980), a biography of Christopher Addison
- David Lloyd George 1863–1945 (1981)
- Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880–1980, part of the Oxford History of Wales (1981) online
- Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (1984)
- (joint ed.) Welsh Society and Nationhood (1984)
- (ed.) The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain (1984, many rev eds down to 2009, almost lm.copies sold)
- Labour People (1987, rev ed 1992)
- (ed.) The Oxford History of Britain (1987, rev ed 2010)
- The Red Dragon and the Red Flag (1989)
- Britain and Europe (1995)
- The People's Peace: Britain since 1945 (1989, rev ed 2001)
- Modern Wales, Politics, Places and People (1995)
- (ed.) The Young Oxford History of Britain and Ireland (1996)
- Callaghan: A Life (1997)
- (ed.) Crime, Police and Protest in Modern British Society (1999)
- The Great Reform Act of 1832 (2001)
- The Twentieth Century (2001)
- Universities and the State (2002)
- Michael Foot: A Life (2007)
- Ages of Reform (2011)
- (ed.) 'David Lloyd George 1863–2013' (2013), Journal of Liberal History issue 77, Online,
- Revolution to Devolution: Reflections on Welsh Democracy (2014)
- My Histories (2015)
References
- ^ Kenneth O. Morgan, My Histories (2015) p 34
- ^ Morgan, My Histories (2015) p 35
- ^ Wales, The Learned Society of. "Kenneth O. Morgan". The Learned Society of Wales. Retrieved 22 August 2023.
- ^ "No. 55876". The London Gazette. 15 June 2000. p. 6507.
- ^ "Kenneth O. Morgan". King's College London. Archived from the original on 19 October 2015. Retrieved 23 March 2014.
- ^ "Gibson-Morgan Elizabeth".
- ^ Kenneth O. Morgan, My Histories (University of Wales Press, 2015) p 85.
- ^ a b Morgan, My Histories (2015) p 86.
Bibliography
- Kenneth O. Morgan, My Histories (2015), autobiography online
- Announcement of his introduction at the House of Lords, House of Lords minutes of proceedings, 12 July 2000