Maldwyn Allen Jones (18 December 1922 – 12 April 2007) was a historian who specialised in American history.

Jones studied at Jesus College, Oxford, from 1946 to 1949, obtaining a first-class degree in history.^[1][2] He was a lecturer at Manchester University before becoming chairman of the British Association for American Studies in 1968 and Commonwealth Professor of American History at University College London in 1971.^[2]

His most famous work was the synthesis The Limits of Liberty: American History 1607-1980, a volume in the "Short Oxford History of the Modern World" series, published in 1983. This remains the most comprehensive single-authored book on American history.^[2]

Publications

Books

• American Immigration (University of Chicago Press, 1961)
• Destination America (Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1976)
• The Limits of Liberty: American History 1607-1980 (Oxford University Press, 1983)

As editor

• Maldwyn Jones, Henry Steele Commager and Marcus Cunliffe (eds.), The American Destiny: an Illustrated Bicentennial History of the United States (20 vols., 1976)

Articles

• "From the Old Country to the New: The Welsh in nineteenth-century America", Flintshire Historical Society Publications, 27 (1975–76): 85–100.
• "The background to emigration from Great Britain in the nineteenth century". In Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (eds.), Dislocation and Emigration: The Social Background of American Immigration, pp. 3–92 (Cambridge, MA, 1973)
• "Ulster emigration, 1783—1815". In E. R. R. Green (ed.), Essays in Scotch-Irish History (London: Routledge, 1969)
• "The Scotch-Irish in British America". In Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (eds.), Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)