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Conyers Read (April 25, 1881 – December 24, 1959) was an American historian who specialized in the History of England in the 15th and 16th centuries. A professor of history at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, he was president of the American Historical Association for the year 1949–1950.
In World War I Read served with the American Red Cross and in World War II he joined the Office of Strategic Services.
Read's first major research project was his edition of the Bardon Papers, documents relating to the imprisonment and trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, published in London in the Camden Society in 1909.J. Franklin Jameson, Henry E. Bourne, Robert Livingston Schuyler, eds., American Historical Review (1911), p. 895 In 1925 he published the monumental Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth in three volumes,Conyers Read, ed., Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1925), 3 vols described in the American Historical Review as "the ripe fruition of upwards of two decades of exhaustive research".'Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, by Conyers Read', review in American Historical Review vol. 31, No. 4 (July, 1926), pp. 766–769 at jstor.org, accessed 30 June 2013
Before the entry of the United States into World War II, Read chaired the Pennsylvania branch of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. In 1941 he was employed by the Office of the Coordinator of Information, which meant spending the academic year 1941–1942 in Washington D.C. There he was lead officer of the British Empire section of the Office of Strategic Services research and analysis branch, predecessor of the CIA, for which task he was recruited by his fellow Harvard historian William L. Langer.
In 1949, at the time of the Cold War, Read was elected president of the American Historical Association, and his presidential address was widely reported. In it, he said the United States needed a militant attitude to survive and called for more discipline. He also sought to enlist historians in the fight against totalitarianism.Anthony Molho, Gordon Stewart Wood, Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 279 In his call to action, he listed those to be resisted: "the Thomism, the Fascism, the Nazism, the Communism".James Claude Malin, On the Nature of History: Essays about History and Dissidence (Lawrence, Kansas, 1954), p. 281: "And note Read's enumeration of totalitarian ideologies against which he issued the call to action: "the Thomist, the Fascist, the Nazi, the Communist," and others." He said:
This address was later printed in the American Historical Review under the title 'Social responsibilities of the historian'.Conyers Read, 'Social responsibilities of the historian', in American Historical Review vol. 55 (1950); noted in William L. Langer et al., Conyers Read, 1881–1959: Scholar, Teacher, Public Servant (M. and V. Dean, 1963, at p. 51 When the progressive Merle Curti became president of the association in 1954, he directly challenged the position taken up by Read and his successor Samuel Eliot Morison, in an address which George Rawick called "one of the most remarkable experiences of my life".Matthew Levin, Cold War University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties (2013), p. 83 In his autobiography, published after Read's death, Dexter Perkins said of Read that "he molded history to promote his convictions".
In 1950, Read commented on the fact that history was increasingly being written for small numbers of specialists and was ignored by most other academics, let alone the general reading public. He blamed "little pedants" who did not have "the courage to attempt history in the grand manner".David Eldridge, Hollywood's History Films (I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 174
Read retired in 1951 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he held for two years. This was to support the writing of a new biography of William Cecil (1520–1598). The Publishers Weekly vol. 159 (1951), p. 1789 The first volume of the work was published in 1955 as Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen ElizabethPenry Williams, The Later Tudors: England, 1547–1603 (1995), p. 566 and was awarded a Folger Shakespeare Library prize worth $1,000. The second volume was published posthumously in 1960 as Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth.
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