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In 2021, McGill University celebrated its bicentennial anniversary, reflecting on contributions to research, education, and other successes. The university’s founding within the context of nineteenth-century Atlantic capitalism requires that a deeper account engage with the more complex and difficult elements of its history.
McGill in History brings together diverse historiographies and perspectives to critically examine how McGill has been implicated in power structures and is the product of conflicting ideologies. James McGill, the university’s namesake, owned and profited from the sale of enslaved Black and Indigenous people, a legacy highlighted by the removal of his statue and ongoing debates over the racially charged Redman name used by the men’s sports teams. Imperialism, settler colonialism, slavery, sexism, and homophobia are elements of McGill’s story that must be fully integrated into a broader understanding of the university’s institutional history. Challenging siloed narratives with new research, the contributors in this volume highlight the important task of scholars to scrutinize and confront history that is unflattering and to rethink their institution’s own story – a reckoning happening across many institutions of higher education around the world.
McGill in History broadens the historical frame of critical university studies, showing how the university can serve as a model for understanding power in modern society.
"McGill in History shows how the genre of university history can be recast. It presents timely understandings of McGill’s intersections with African enslavement; with the use of funds deriving from Indigenous lands and supposedly held in trust; with the complex roles of wealthy benefactors; with the impingement of social tensions on contests of ideas and disciplines; with the external and internal implications of societal debates over the wartime exile of Japanese-Canadians or the Quiet Revolution; with gay organizations’ insistence on inclusivity; and ultimately with matters of current global concern. This book shares with the best histories of higher education the goal of placing the university into its always-complicated societal context rather than depicting it in a kind of gloriously idealized detachment. The crucial achievement of this volume is that it has found so many thoroughly innovative ways of fulfilling that purpose." John Reid, Saint Mary’s University
“By filling these pages with serious and accessible scholarship, the editors have moved toward a truer if less stable image of the university—as it was, as it is, and as it could be.” Literary Review of Canada
Brian Lewis is professor of history at McGill University.
Don Nerbas is associate professor of history and St Andrew’s Society/McEuen Scholarship Foundation Chair in Canadian-Scottish Studies at McGill University.
Melissa N. Shaw is assistant professor of history at McGill University.