John Richard Green

John Richard Green (1837–1883), whose name is sometimes misspelled Greene, was an English historian. Born in Oxford, he was ordained and served as a curate and vicar in the East End of London, while writing for the Saturday Review and other journals. His Short History of the English People (1874), which turned from kings and battles to the life of the nation as a whole, became an enormous popular success. He followed it with a longer History of the English People, The Making of England and Stray Studies from England and Italy. Ill with tuberculosis, he died at Menton at forty-five.