with the "Bielefeld School" of historians, who argued for the Sonderweg thesis that saw the roots of Germany's political development in the first half of the 20th century in a "failed bourgeois revolution" in 1848. Following a contemporary trend that opposed the previous "great man" theory of history, Evans was a member of a group of young British historians who in the 1970s sought to examine German history during the German Empire "from below". These scholars highlighted "the importance of the grass-roots of politics and the everyday life and experience of ordinary people". "History is about people, and their relationships. It's about the perennial question of 'how much free will do people have in building their own lives, and making a future", Evans has said. He says he supported the creation of a "new school of people's history", which was a result of a trend that "has taken place across a whole range of historical subjects, political opinions, and methodological approaches and has been expressed in many different ways". In 1978, as editor of a collection of essays by young British historians entitled Society And Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, he launched a critique of the 'top-down' approach of the Bielefeld School associated with Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka regarding Wilhelmine Germany. With the historians Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, Evans instead emphasized the "self-mobilization from below" of key sociopolitical groups, as well as the modernity of National Socialism. In the 1980s, Evans organized ten international workshops on modern German social history at the University of East Anglia that did a good deal to refine these ideas, to pioneer research in this new historical field and, in six collections of papers, present it to an Anglophone readership. Among Evans' major research works are Death in Hamburg (1987), a study of class conflict and liberal government in 19th-century Germany using the example of Hamburg’s cholera epidemics and applying statistical methods to the exploration of social inequality in an industrializing society, and Rituals of Retribution (1996), a study of capital punishment in German history applying structural anthropological concepts to the rituals of public execution up to the mid-19th century and exploring the politics of the death penalty until its abolition by East Germany in 1987. In Death in Hamburg, Evans studied the cholera outbreak in Hamburg in 1892, which he concluded was caused by a failure in the medical system to safeguard against