Deborah Cohen, Guy Ortolano and Susan Pedersen

For more than four decades, Peter Mandler has enriched the field of British history on both sides of the Atlantic by serving as its preeminent cultural intermediary. In the 1970s and 1980s, plenty of British historians left the UK to make their careers in the US. Peter was unusual in tacking in the opposite direction: first as a youthful self-exile from Southern California who opted to study in Oxford, then as a young lecturer settling permanently in Britain during the grey Major years. Moving from the US to Britain gave Peter an opportunity to explain the Americans to the British and, just as importantly, to explain to American historians of Britain how British historians of Britain comprehended (or sometimes, miscomprehended and distrusted) their scholarly enthusiasms. If modern British historians working on both sides of the Atlantic understand each other better than they did forty years ago, it is in no small measure because Peter was our go-between.

Bridging a field carried out in two very different national contexts required cultural mediation of the most thorough sort. Even while tackling one aspect of British society after another, including the aristocracy, the stately home, the concept of ‘national character’, and secondary schooling, he was welcoming a steady stream of American waifs and strays who showed up on his doorstep. He was staying up to date on the latest from North America, freshening up what he knew from his always prolific reading (open book in hand while walking down the street) with first-hand participant observer interviews. To anyone who’d profited from Peter’s cultural translations, his luminous, empathetic and not uncritical Return from the Natives (2013), about Margaret Mead and her Boasian circle of friends who worked to render cultures mutually comprehensible and respectful, seemed a perfect fit between author and subject. Long before Peter wrote on Mead, he had himself to learn the skills of ‘culture cracking’. And with the kind of generosity that Mead too showed, he passed that knowledge along.

When we and our peers came as young North American scholars back in the 1980s and 1990s to a country most of us didn’t know well, Peter was the person to whom we could turn. He told us about the National Register of Archives and the Newspaper Library at Colindale, he brought us to seminars at the Institute of Historical Research, he made introductions and connections, functioning himself as a kind of human equivalent of the Institute tea-room, and he explained the countless things that bewilder an American student: what ‘rates’ were and how land taxes were assessed, why Lord Palmerston was in the Commons not the Lords, and how Sir Edward Wood and Lord Irwin and Lord Halifax could all be the same guy. Peter made sure we knew that Pepys was pronounced ‘peeps’ and Cholmondeley ‘chumly’; he’d catch our mistakes and catch us again when we made more. Twenty years later, he would do the same thing for our students, explaining how the ‘record creator’ tab in the National Archives catalogue worked, how to use the Wellesley Index to find the names of anonymous authors, and that the ‘full text’ search function of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography could, with one click, produce a network of intellectual influences that it once took a graduate student a year to compile.

But Peter didn’t just explain how to work in a foreign and still often clubby academic culture, he changed that culture too. If politics is made by those who show up, the profession is made – and changed – by those who serve it. None of us would have thought to join the Royal Historical Society, but when Peter became Honorary Secretary, join we did. We joined editorial boards and dissertation committees too, because he asked us. But Peter didn’t just work to deprovincialise British history in Britain; he made British history in North America less insular and self-regarding too. Peter came faithfully to the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) and he persuaded ever larger numbers of his UK-based colleagues to join him. By the 2010s, even when it was in Little Rock or Vancouver, about a third of the conference flew in from the UK.

This is how intellectual cultures are built and broadened; this is how academic worlds democratise. In an astringent and still much-cited article from 2004, ‘The Problem with Cultural History’, Peter argued that we, as historians, needed to be more methodologically serious in our approach to culture and to texts – to distinguish between intent and capacity, to track and not assume influence, to assess not just content but ‘throw’. But he also said we should take our collective responsibilities more seriously – and we couldn’t get mad at him, for he was doing just what he urged. If academic history will still have ‘throw’, it will be because we sustain the institutions – the journals, learned societies, book series, conferences – within which it can thrive. Canny marketing may have saved the English country house, but the merest glance at the history shelves of a high street bookshop (Churchill’s cabinets, Churchill’s paintings, Churchill’s pets) shows the cost of letting the market decide what we research and write.

This might make the work of the historian today sound like a dreary slog from committee to archive to writing desk. Nothing could be further from the truth. For, in reviewing our lives-with-Peter over the past twenty, thirty and forty-plus years, what we mostly remember is how much fun it all was. Intellectual collaborations are exciting: it was fun for Susan to co-author an introduction to a festschrift for John Clive with Peter so that readers couldn’t tell where one voice stopped and another started, invigorating for Deborah to dissect the History Manifesto’s premises with him for the American Historical Review. But nothing was more of a blast, for Guy and Susan, than to join Peter in setting up the New York–Cambridge Training Collaboration in Modern British History (NYCTC), which would serve as a transatlantic framework for doctoral students at Cambridge, Columbia and NYU for the next decade.

It may have been that we were just getting older by then and knew what we were doing. We knew that PhD students in the US needed a ‘cohort’ if they were to learn their field and not be isolated. We knew that UK PhD students would benefit from exposure to their US peers’ often comparative or imperial projects. We knew, too, that for the thing to work, meddlesome bureaucracies should be kept at arm’s length; we would operate for a couple of years before our respective graduate schools quite figured out what we were doing. We were certain that, if we built the thing (with our students, full disclosure, doing much of the building), the money to run it would somehow materialise. We were lucky: Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities stepped up to fund the first workshop, and after that the other institutions stepped up too.

So, over a decade from 2015, a shifting group of nine faculty members, some sixty PhD students (about twenty at any one time), four post-doctoral fellows and half a dozen visitors met for monthly online book groups and work-in-progress sessions, annual (or sometimes more frequent) in-person workshops, meet-ups at NACBS and the occasional summer get-together. Half of the ten in-person workshops were held in New York, half in Cambridge. Students workshopped dissertation chapters, participated in roundtables and endured professional development sessions. They also went out on the town.

Professionally, the collaboration did what was hoped, fostering connections and networks. The New York students now had go-betweens of their own when they came to the UK for research; they and British students collaborated to propose NACBS panels. But with its receptions, meals, drinks, walks and tours, NYCTC was always a social and collegial enterprise as much as an intellectual and professional one. Growing above all out of Peter’s friendships at Columbia and NYU, it built upon long-shared conversations, collaborations and exchanges. And by creating a venue for a new generation to do the same, NYCTC fostered both knowledge and friendship.

Many faculty members – the initial planning group of Mandler, Pedersen and Ortolano, but also Lucy Delap, Jon Lawrence and Helen McCarthy, and more recently Mike Joseph, James Stafford and Ren Pepitone – helped keep the project afloat. But Peter was always its impresario. He was fundraiser, convenor, host, roundtable chair, dinner companion, tour guide and toastmaster. He would explain the architecture of the Sidgwick site, arrange an off-hours visit to the David Parr House, or give his North American guests the full Grantchester experience. Few will forget the time he was persuaded (though, it has to be said, he didn’t require much persuasion) to address a closing dinner from a curious pulpit, looming high above the hall in Queens’ College. ‘Do you think we could convince Peter – oh, there he goes!’