Sir Richard John Evans FRSL FRHistS FBA FLSW (born September 29, 1947) is a British historian of 19th- and 20th-century Europe with a focus on Germany.

[1] He largely agrees with Fischer that 19th-century German social development paved the way for the rise of the Third Reich, but Evans takes pains to point out that many other possibilities could have happened.

[1] Evans studied under Fischer in Hamburg in 1970 and 1971 but came to disagree with the "Bielefeld School" of historians, who argued for the Sonderweg thesis that saw the roots of Germany's political development in the first half of the 20th century in a "failed bourgeois revolution" in 1848.

[8] He says he supported the creation of a "new school of people's history", which was a result of a trend that "has taken place across a whole range of historical subjects, political opinions, and methodological approaches and has been expressed in many different ways".

With the historians Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, Evans instead emphasized the "self-mobilization from below" of key sociopolitical groups, as well as the modernity of National Socialism.

In the 1980s, Evans organized ten international workshops on modern German social history at the University of East Anglia that did a good deal to refine these ideas, to pioneer research in this new historical field and, in six collections of papers, present it to an Anglophone readership.

[9] Among Evans' major research works are Death in Hamburg (1987), a study of class conflict and liberal government in 19th-century Germany using the example of Hamburg’s cholera epidemics and applying statistical methods to the exploration of social inequality in an industrializing society, and Rituals of Retribution (1996), a study of capital punishment in German history applying structural anthropological concepts to the rituals of public execution up to the mid-19th century and exploring the politics of the death penalty until its abolition by East Germany in 1987.

Thus, in Evans' view, capital punishment in Germany was never a mere matter of law being disinterestedly applied but was rather a form of state power being exercised.

In that book, Evans took issue with Nolte's acceptance of the Commissar Order as a legitimate military order; with Nolte's argument that the Einsatzgruppen massacres of Ukrainian Jews were a justifiable "preventive security" response to Soviet partisan attacks; his description (citing Viktor Suvorov) of Operation Barbarossa as a "preventative war" forced on Hitler by an impending Soviet attack; and his complaints that much scholarship on the Shoah expressed the views of "biased" Jewish historians.

Evans suggests that the spread in the 1980s and 1990s of post-modernist theories, which declare that history is solely the construct of the historian and depict the rationalist tradition of the West as a form of oppression, was not necessarily left-wing or progressive, for by denying the possibility of accessing past facts, it had also done much to increase the appeal of Holocaust denial.

In his expert witness report he wrote: Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject.

Every time there is a euphemism, Mr. Irving ... or a camouflage piece of statement or language about Madagascar, you want to treat it as the literal truth, because it serves your purpose of trying to exculpate Hitler.

"[33] Robert Citino says, "Read together, the three volumes constitute a remarkably comprehensive treatment of the origins, course, and death of the Hitler regime, and are likely to be standard works for a long time to come.

"[34] Ed Ericson says: Evans masterfully interweaves testimony that has come to light in the intervening decades with learned judgments from hundreds of authors to create a balanced and thoughtful narrative.

[35]The first volume, The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany (published by Penguin in 2003), shows how a country torn apart by the First World War, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation and the Great Depression moved towards an increasingly authoritarian solution.

"[37] However, Timothy Snyder, while praising Evans's "vertical method [of] weav[ing] together the experiences of people and the workings of the institutions of power" in Germany, criticized the third volume's discussion of occupied Poland and the USSR as oversimplified and sometimes inaccurate.

[citation needed] In 2013, Evans delivered the Menachem Stern Jerusalem Lectures to the Historical Society of Israel, publishing them in 2014 as Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History.

Gerard De Groot, writing in The Times, commented that the book "chronicles a turbulent and confusing century with wonderful clarity and verve...in one great canvas of immense detail and beauty ... transnational history at its finest."

Previous holders of the title have included John Dalberg-Acton (1895), Herbert Butterfield (1963), Geoffrey Elton (1983), Patrick Collinson (1988) and Quentin Skinner (1998).

Evans is the first historian to have to apply for the post and be interviewed by a Board of Electors, including Cambridge's Vice-Chancellor, Alison Richard, and representatives of the history faculty and the university, as well as external assessors from Yale, Harvard, Oxford and London.

On 27 January 2010 he was elected to the position of President of Wolfson College, Cambridge, serving the statutory seven-year term of office until retiring from the post on 30 September 2017.

During this period he focused on building up the college as a centre of contemporary culture, with art exhibitions by Richard Deacon and Anthony Green, and talks by Martin Amis and Neil MacGregor, among many others.

[42] On 7 February 2019, Evans gave a lecture at Chancellor's Hall in the University of London's Senate House to launch his new biography of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, A Life in History.

[43] At the time, a boycott of the University of London including the Senate House, organised by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain and supported by a number of high-profile politicians, journalists and academics, including John McDonnell, Owen Jones, Ken Loach and David Graeber in order to pressure University of London to bring their outsourced maintenance staff back in house, was in place.