R. A. C. Parker
British historian (1927–2001)
Robert Alexander Clarke Parker (15 June 1927 – 23 April 2001) was a British historian who specialised in Britain's appeasement of Nazi Germany and the Second World War. Fellow historian Kenneth O. Morgan called him "perhaps the leading authority on the international crises of the 1930s, appeasement and the coming of war".
Early life
Parker was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire to a family with Scottish roots, which Parker was proud of; he changed his first name to Alastair. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and after the war's end won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. He studied modern history, for which he gained a First. For his doctoral thesis, Parker studied Coke of Norfolk and the British Agricultural Revolution. The thesis was eventually published in 1975.
Academic career
In 1952 Lewis Namier appointed Parker to a lectureship in history at Manchester University, a post he held until 1957. From 1957 until his retirement in 1997, he was a Fellow and tutor at The Queen's College, Oxford. His main area of historical study was Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and the appeasement of Germany.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “R. A. C. Parker” as british historian (1927–2001). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 20, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7273429. VIAF identifies the subject as 98351563. The Library of Congress control number is n50051635. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1927, 2001, 1975 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “R. A. C. Parker” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.