The Past Speaks

“EH.NEWS POSTING —————–
“We announce with great sadness that Mary MacKinnon died on Sunday  July 25 at Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.  Mary was diagnosed with leiomyosarcoma, a particularly aggressive cancer, in January of
2010. She had since been undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Throughout her illness she maintained her characteristic humor, warmth, and concern for others. Mary was only hospitalized a few days before her death, and her family and friends were with her when she died.Mary did her undergraduate work at Queen’s University, Ontario, and received her PhD from Nuffield College, Oxford University. She returned to Queen’s as an assistant professor, and then moved to McGill University in 1989.”

Professor MacKinnon was a great scholar of Canadian economic history, so her death is a loss for the academic world as a whole. I cited a few of her publications and read many more.  She published articles that ought to be read by all historians, political as well as economic. I am thinking in particular of her  co-authored pieces “Dominion or Republic? Migrants to North America from the United Kingdom, 1870-1910,” Economic History Review, 55 (2002), pp. 666-696.  and  “Conspicuous by their Absence: French Canadians and the Settlement of the Canadian West”, Journal of Economic History, 65 (2005), pp. 822-849. In fact, I think that all undergrads should have to read the article on French Canadians in the west, since it deals with a truly fundamental issue in Canadian history– had French Canadians dispersed all over the country instead of remaining concentrated in one province, Canadian history would have been very, very different. The article attempts to explain why so few French-speakers moved into Western Canada, which became a basically English-speaking region of the country.

I only knew her from her publications, but she was a good scholar working in an important but neglected field.