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Stephen Koss was an American historian specialising in Britain.
A professor of history at Columbia University in New York, where he completed his doctorate, which was turned into his first book John Morley at the India Office, 1905–1910 published in 1969, the same year as his biography of R. B. Haldane. He was also a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
Koss is best remembered for a two volume work The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, respectively covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Neal Ascherson, reviewing the second volume in 1985, wrote: "Koss was the archive-cruncher of his age. But he had another gift, which was to make the imparting of densely-packed information stylish, readable, often mockingly witty."
A tribute volume appeared in 1987: The Political Culture of Modern Britain: Studies in Memory of Stephen Koss, edited by J.M.W. Bean, with a foreword by John Gross.
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