George Ramsay Cook

George Ramsay Cook (born November 28, 1931), is a Canadian historian and general editor of the "Dictionary of Canadian Biography". He was professor of history at York University for 25 years until 1996. Through his championing of so-called "limited identities", Cook contributed to the rise of the New Social History, which uses "class, gender and ethnicity" as its three main categories of analysis. During his teaching career, Cook supervised the work of many prominent social historians such as Franca Iacovetta.

His works on the history of Canada include:

*"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 Robert Craig Brown 1975
*"The regenerators: social criticism in late Victorian Canada" 1985
*"Canada, Quebec and the uses of nationalism" 1986

In 1997, the Ramsay Cook Research Scholarship was established at York University to honour his contribution to the field of history.

Politically, he publicly supported Pierre Elliott Trudeau in his attempt to gain the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada in 1968.

He is married to Eleanor Cook, an English professor at the University of Toronto

Honours

Cook received the Governor General's Award for non-fiction in 1985, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Cook was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Japanese government in 1994. [ [http://www.editions-harmattan.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=article&no=8245 L'Harmattan web site (in French)] ]

In 2005, he was the recipient of the Molson Prize in Social Sciences and Humanities.

References