Nation, Ideas, Identities: Essays in Honour of Ramsay Cook

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal, Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality and Canadian History to
1967, and the co-author of The College o

Ramsay Cook was the country’s foremost Canadian historian during the
latter part of the 20th century. He has done more than any other
individual in the recent past to transform how we think of Canada’s
history. Emerging from the older tradition that saw history as past
politics, Cook demonstrated a keen interest in the history of ideas and
ideologies in his first book in 1963. The author of some 15 volumes, his
special forte was the essay where he could illuminate and contextualize
an idea with consummate skill. When he was consumed by the turbulence
that accompanied Quebec’s Quiet Revolution during the 1960s, he
emerged as a public intellectual who attempted to introduce Canada’s
two main language groups to each other in essays eventually published in
two influential collections. Aware that the emphasis placed by Canadian
historians on the importance of the federal state detracted from
understanding section, class, and ethnicity in Canada’s past, Cook
developed the idea that Canadians enjoyed a variety of limited
identities in addition to those loyalties that bound them to the
nation-state. This fertile idea of multiple identities opened the
floodgates to new subjects in Canadian history and released the
discipline from its former parochialism. Cook himself went on to new
explorations in cultural history, particularly as it found expression in
the paintings of such artists as Cornelius Krieghoff, William Kurelek,
and Tim Zuck.

Ramsay Cook’s legacy remains not only in print but also in the
extraordinarily large number of doctoral students he advised during 36
years at the University of Toronto and York University. Thirty-five
students completed theses under his direction, and most had an impact on
the writing of Canadian history. In this celebration volume, 15 former
students contributed diverse essays on Canada’s history within
sections on ideas, culture, nationalism, women, and Native people. Such
divisions are appropriate as these are all topics that Cook himself
helped to further. A bibliography includes all of Cook’s published
work. This volume will be welcomed by all those interested in Canadian
history and Canadian studies. It is a fitting tribute to an
extraordinarily able and industrious scholar who also managed to endear
himself to many people.