J. H. Plumb

Sir John Harold Plumb (1911–2001) was a preeminent historian who wrote primarily on the 18th century and authored 35 books. At the start of World War II, he left Cambridge University to work at the top secret Bletchley Park facility, where he headed a section working on a German Naval hand cipher, Reservehandverfahren. After the War he became a Fellow of Christ's College at Cambridge, and was named Master of the College from 1978 to 1982. For American Heritage, Plumb wrote The Italian Renaissance (1961) and co-authored the American Heritage Book of the Revolution. Among his other books are England in the Eighteenth Century, The First Four Georges, The Penguin Book of the Renaissance, and Royal Heritage: The Treasures of the British Crown.

Articles by this Author

America Illusion And Reality, August 1976 | Vol. 27, No. 5

No event in the history of Western man provided so profound a shock as the discovery of America

The French Connection, December 1974 | Vol. 26, No. 1

Rakehells, men of good will, adventurers, and bunglers were all in the glittering pageant when the Old World came to help out the New

Reading, Writing, And History, Februrary 1968 | Vol. 19, No. 2

Our Last King, June 1960 | Vol. 11, No. 4

Cursed by ancestry,bedeviled by his posterity, beset by forces he could not grasp, George III is usually remembered as the ogre of Jefferson’s Declaration. An eminent English historian reassesses that strange and pathetic personality

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