Background
Peter Mandler was born on January 29, 1958, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and grew up in Southern California. He is the son of George and Jean Matter Mandler. He has a younger brother Michael.
Peter Mandler was born on January 29, 1958, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and grew up in Southern California. He is the son of George and Jean Matter Mandler. He has a younger brother Michael.
Peter Mandler received a Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honors at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1978. Then he studied at Harvard University where he received a Master of Arts degree in 1980 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1984.
Peter Mandler began his career after receiving a doctor's degree in 1984. He became an assistant professor of history at Princeton University where he served till 1991. Then he moved to the United Kingdom and joined London Guildhall University where he held the position of a senior lecturer till 1995. The next two years he spent as a reader there. In 1997 he became a professor of history and then went to the University of Cambridge in 2001 where he is now a professor of Modern Cultural History and Bailey College Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College. His research interests include British history since 1800, especially cultural, intellectual and social history, the history of the humanities and social sciences in Britain and America, concepts and methods in cultural history, and educational history and policy.
Mandler’s writing career began with the book Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830-1852 (1990). This book challenges the view that there was a smooth and inevitable progression towards liberalism in early nineteenth-century England. It examines the argument used by the high Whigs that the landed aristocracy still had a positive contribution to make to the welfare of the people. Drawing on a rich variety of original sources, including many country house archives, Peter Mandler paints a vivid composite picture of the high aristocracy at the peak of its wealth and power, and provides a provocative and original analysis of how their rejection of middle-class manners helped them to govern Britain in two troubled decades of social unrest.
Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (2013) tells the story of the national character studies through which Mead and her closest associates such as Ruth Benedict and Geoffrey Gorer sought to apply anthropological and psychological methods to international relations at a time of rapid globalization. Mandler's other key publications include Great Philanthropists: Wealth and Charity in the Modern World, 1815-1945 (2017), The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (2006), History and National Life (2002), The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997), and others. He is currently working on a book The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain's Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War which will be published in 2020.
(What is a philanthropist? Why do they do what they do? Wh...)
2017(Who were the poor of the world's first metropolises, and ...)
1990(What kind of people are “the English”? What characteristi...)
2006(Written by a team of eminent historians, these essays exp...)
1994
Quotations:
"The policymakers find it easier to make policy than to find the funds to back it up."
"There is intrinsic value in keeping the springs of knowledge 'clear and untainted' but there is greater value in ensuring that the supply reaches the consumer in something resembling its original state."
Peter Mandler is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, where he has also been the president and an honorary secretary. He was chair of Editorial Boards at Historical Journal. In 2015 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the British Academy. From 2018 he is Chair of the Modern History section of the British Academy.
Peter Mandler married Ruth Ehrlich on December 21, 1987. The marriage produced two children, Benjamin and Hannah.
George Mandler (1924-2016) was a founding chair of the University of California San Diego’s Department of Psychology and one of the central figures in psychology’s cognitive revolution. He directed the Center for Human Information Processing from 1965 till 1990. Mandler is the author of Mind and Emotion, Mind and Body: Psychology of Emotion and Stress, Human Nature Explored, A History of Modern Experimental Psychology, and other well-regarded volumes.
Jean Mandler (born 1929) is a professor emeritus of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. A renowned authority on cognitive development in infancy, Mandler's specific areas of interest include concept formation in infancy and the ability of infants to recall the past. She still does some work in her field of cognitive and developmental psychology.
Ruth Ehrlich was for several years the first violinist in the Fairfield Quartet. Since then her wide-ranging career has included playing with the English Chamber Orchestra, the contemporary music group Apartment House and the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. She has a music degree from King’s College Cambridge. Ruth plays on a Nicolaus Gagliano violin of 1772.
