Asa Briggs interviewed by Jose Harris, part of the Interviews with Historians collection
Interviews with Historians
Interviews with Historians
Interviews with Historians was a landmark series of interviews between prominent historians. This page introduces the collection and gives access to the interviews.
Introduction
The Interviews with Historians collection comprises interviews between prominent historians, created in the 1980s and early 1990s by the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) working with the University of Cambridge. The Interviews were created to reflect on how the history professional had changed during the twentieth century, and were made available for sale at the IHR on DVD and video tape. Since their sale ended, they have been only been available within the IHR, and with increasing difficulty due to the gradual obsolescence of video tapes, apart from one or two videos that were uploaded to YouTube.
In 2023, the IHR embarked upon a project to digitise the Interviews from our surviving video tape archive of some 130 video tapes. The digitisation was performed by our digitisation partners Iron Mountain Media & Archival Services and involved processes such as "tape baking" to preserve the integrity of the tapes and transferring each video's content to electronic files. These files are now securely stored using the University's digital preservation facilities. The Library & Digital team at the IHR then assessed each video and selected the best available version. These videos have been uploaded to the IHR's YouTube channel and made available afresh via these webpages.
To learn more about the Interviews, see the following articles:
Pat Thane, "Interviews with Historians", The Historian, 36 (1992), pp. 18–20
Roger Adelson, and Russell Smith. "Videotaped Interviews with British Historians, 1985-1998", Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 31 (1999), pp. 257–68, https://doi.org/10.2307/4052745.
