Ramsay Cook: A Life in History

Abstract

Ramsay Cook (1931–2016) was a respected scholar and a much-loved friend whose scholarship and graduate supervision helped a new generation of historians rewrite the history of Canada. To mark his life and career, the Canadian Historical Association hosted a round table at its 2017 annual meeting which provided the basis for the short essays in this “Life in History” section dedicated to Cook. Donald Wright uses Barker Fairley’s portrait of a young Ramsay Cook as a starting point to consider his career and its animating themes. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in the late 1960s, Greg Kealey studied with Cook; a few years later, he and Cook discovered a shared interest in the radical Toronto journalist Phillips Thompson, also known as Jimuel Briggs. One of “Ramsay’s girls,” Franca Iacovetta remembers a generous doctoral thesis supervisor who took an active interest in not only her scholarship but the scholarship of a number of feminist historians. Strictly speaking, Adele Perry was not Cook’s doctoral student, but as a graduate student at York University, she appreciated his capacious understanding of Canadian history and his intellectual commitment to historical analysis unhooked from the yoke of nationalism. Robert Fraser was neither Cook’s student nor his university colleague, but he worked closely with him at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (dcb) and came to admire his leadership and his commitment to scholarship during a difficult moment in the dcb’s history.