Simon Schama
| Simon Schama CBE |
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Schama in 2013
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| Born | Simon Michael Schama 13 February 1945 Marylebone, London, England |
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| Nationality | British | ||
| Ethnicity | Jewish | ||
| Alma mater | Christ's College, Cambridge | ||
| Spouse | Virginia Papaioannou | ||
| Children | 2 | ||
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Simon Michael Schama, CBE (born 13 February 1945) is an English historian specializing in art history, Dutch history, and French history. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University, New York. He first came to popular public attention with his history of the French Revolution titled Citizens, published in 1989. In the United Kingdom, he is perhaps best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC television documentary series A History of Britain broadcast between 2000 and 2002.
Schama was born in Marylebone, London. His mother, Gertie (née Steinberg), was from an Ashkenazi Jewish family (from Kaunas, Lithuania), and his father, Arthur Schama, was of Sephardi Jewish background (from Smyrna / now Izmir in Turkey), later moving through Moldova and Romania. In the mid-1940s, the family moved to Southend-on-Sea in Essex before moving back to London. Schama writes of this period in the Introduction to Landscape & Memory (pp. 3–4):
I had no hill [previously alluding to that in Puck of Pook's Hill], but I did have the Thames. It was not the upstream river that the poets in my Palgrave claimed burbled betwixt mossy banks. [...] It was the low, gull-swept estuary, the marriage bed of salt and fresh water, stretching as far as I could see from my northern Essex bank, toward a thin black horizon on the other side. That would be Kent, the sinister enemy who always seemed to beat us in the County Cricket Championship. [...]
In 1956, Schama won a scholarship to the private Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Cricklewood, (from 1961 Elstree, Hertfordshire). He then studied history at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he was taught by J. H. Plumb. He graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Starred First in 1966.
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