Jeffrey Green | |
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Born | Jeffrey Philip Green 9 October 1944 Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England |
Occupation(s) | Historian and writer |
Notable work | Black Europe |
Website | jeffreygreen |
Jeffrey Philip Green (born 9 October 1944) [1] is a British historian and writer, who has been particularly active in researching and documenting the Black British experience, publishing books and articles since the 1980s.
Jeffrey Green was born in 1944 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, and grew up in London, England. [2]
Green worked for Grindlays Bank both in London and Uganda, and as an export manager for British manufacturers. [2] He has worked as an independent historian for more than three decades. His notable work on Black British history includes research into the life of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor that culminated in the 2011 biography Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Musical Life. [3] Green edited trumpeter Leslie Thompson's autobiography, first published in 1985 and reissued as Swing from a Small Island - The Story of Leslie Thompson by Northway Publications in 2009. [4]
Green has written more than 30 articles for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . [2] Other publications to which he has contributed include The Oxford Companion to Black British History, The Grove Dictionary of Jazz , The Journal of Caribbean History , Black Music Research Journal, Black Perspective in Music, New Community, Storyville [5] and History Today . [6]
In History Today in 2000, he argued that the black presence in the UK before 1940 had largely been ignored by historians. [7] He is a regular participant in seminars and conferences. [8] [9]
Green has also been active in trying to trace fugitive slaves who escaped from the US to the UK. [10]
In 2015 he was nominated for a Grammy (jointly with Rainer Lotz and Howard Rye) for work on the 44-CD boxed set with two books, Black Europe, which rescued recordings made in Europe by people of African descent prior to 1928. [5]
Green lives in East Grinstead, Sussex. [1]
A collection of Green's research papers, reference material, and papers of the Barbour-James family that he acquired after the death of Amy Barbour-James, are held at the Black Cultural Archives. [1] Green's website, founded in 2009 partly in response to what he regarded as "ill-founded articles on history and also to make available images and documents that he had been accumulating since the late 1970s", [11] was in 2020 taken on by the British Library as part of the national UK Web Archive. [12]