Sir Charles William Chadwick Oman, (12 January 1860 – 23 June 1946) was a British military historian. His reconstructions of medieval battles from the fragmentary and distorted accounts left by chroniclers were pioneering.
Early life
Oman was born in Muzaffarpur district, in the Bihar Province of British India, the only child of a British planter, Charles Philip Austin Oman, and his wife Anne Chadwick. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he studied under William Stubbs.
In 1884, he was invited to become a founding member of the Stubbs Society, which was under Stubbs's patronage.
Career
In 1881, Oman was elected to a Prize Fellowship at All Souls College, where he remained for the rest of his academic career, later becoming also Librarian of his college. In October 1900, due to the increasing deafness of the Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford, Montagu Burrows, Oman was appointed as his Deputy, to take over the active duties of the role for a stipend of £500 a year. Burrows continued to hold the chair until his death in 1905, when Oman succeeded him. Oman was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy and later served as president of the Royal Historical Society (1917–1921), the Numismatic Society and the Royal Archaeological Institute.
Among his teaching activities at Oxford, with C. T. Atkinson of Exeter College he taught a special subject in military history focussing on the Peninsular War.
Oman's academic career was interrupted by the First World War, during which he was employed by the government's Press Bureau and the Foreign Office.
