Fonds F0293 - Ramsay Cook fonds

George Ramsay Cook (1931-2016), educator and author, was born in Alameda, Saskatchewan to a United Church minister and his wife. He earned his BA at the University of Manitoba (1954), his MA at Queen's University (1956), and his PhD at the University of Toronto (1960) with a dissertation on John W. Dafoe. Cook joined the History Department at York University in 1969 following ten years as a member of the History Department of the University of Toronto. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, an Officer of the Order of Canada, and received the Governor General's Award for non-fiction in 1985. Among numerous other awards and recognition, in 2005 Cook was the recipient of the Molson Prize in the Social Sciences & Humanities. Cook authored several studies in the field of Canadian history including "The politics of John W. Dafoe and the Free press" (1963), "Canada and the French Canadian question" (1966), "The Maple leaf forever" (1971), "Canada 1896-1921: a nation transformed", with R.C. Brown, (1975), "The regenerators: social criticism in late Victorian Canada" (1985), "Canada, Quebec and the uses of nationalism" (1986), and several other books, articles and studies. Cook also played a part in Canadian politics, promoting a strong federal government. Cook and other academics publicly supported Pierre Elliott Trudeau's bid for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada in 1968. His last book was "The Teeth of Time" (2006), a memoir focussed on his friendship with Pierre Elliott Trudeau. From 1989 until 2006 he served as executive editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography/Dictionnaire biographique du Canada.