John Ashton Cannon is an English historian specialising in 18th-century British politics.

Biography

Cannon was educated at Peterhouse College, Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

 and gained his PhD at Bristol University

University of Bristol

The University of Bristol is a public research university located in Bristol, United Kingdom. One of the so-called "red brick" universities, it received its Royal Charter in 1909, although its predecessor institution, University College, Bristol, had been in existence since 1876.The University is...

 (where he was appointed Lecturer in 1961 and Senior Lecturer in 1967 as well as Reader in 1970). In 1976 he was appointed Chairman of Modern History at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Dean of the Faculty of Arts in 1979. He was also employed by the History of Parliament Trust. His edition of Junius

Junius

Junius was the pseudonym of a writer who contributed a series of letters to the Public Advertiser, from 21 January 1769 to 21 January 1772. The signature had been already used, apparently by him, in a letter of 21 November 1768...

's Letters

1772 Letters of Junius

Letters of Junius a collection of private and open letters from an anonymous polemicist Junius, as well as other letters in-reply from people to whom Junius had written between 1769 and 1772...

has been described by Junius' entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as the most "authoritative collection".

When Cannon wrote a review of E. P. Thompson

E. P. Thompson

Edward Palmer Thompson was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class...

's Whigs and Hunters that was critical of the book, Thompson replied that Cannon appeared to imply "that I am a shoddy historical craftsman throughout...capable of fabricating and falsifying evidence, changing the grounds of my argument to suit my whim, and subordinating the evidence to the "interests of progressive history"."

Works

• The Fox-North Coalition. Crisis of the Constitution, 1782–4 (1969).
• Parliamentary Reform, 1640-1832 (1973).
• The Letters of Junius (editor, 1978).
• The Historian at Work (editor, 1980).
• The Whig Ascendancy. Colloquies on Hanoverian Britain (editor, 1981).
• ‘The Isthmus Repaired: The Resurgence of the English Aristocracy, 1660-1760’, Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982), pp. 431–53.
• Aristocratic Century. The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (1984).
• The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians (editor amongst others, 1988).
• The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Monarchy (with Ralph Griffiths, 1988; 2nd edn, 2000).
• A Dictionary of British History (editor, 2004; 2nd edn, 2009).
• The Kings and Queens of Britain (with Anne Hargreaves, 2004; 2nd edn, 2009).