Gregory S. Kealey CM FRHistS FRSC (born 1948) is a historian of the working class in Canada, founding editor of the journal Labour/Le Travail , and former vice-president (research) and provost of the University of New Brunswick, where he is Professor Emeritus of History. The author and editor of numerous books and articles on labour history, intelligence studies, and state security, Kealey is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Royal Society of Canada and served as president of the Canadian Historical Association. [1] In 2016 the Canadian Historical Review published a memoir of his career. [2] In 2017 he was appointed a member of the Order of Canada.
Born in Toronto in 1948, Kealey attended St. Michael's College School, a high school for boys, where he focused on history. He completed his bachelor's degree in Modern History at the University of Toronto in 1970, serving on the Students Administrative Council and participating in the student movement. He completed his MA and PhD at the University of Rochester, working under the supervision of American labour historian Herbert Gutman and Christopher Lasch on a dissertation that examined the Toronto working class during the transition to industrial capitalism. He would later publish this work in the Canadian Historical Association's Macdonald prize-winning book Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism (1980). He followed this work with the co-authored (with Bryan Palmer), the CHA and AHA Corey prize-winning Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario (1982).
In 1976 Kealey helped found the journal Labour/Le Travail to provide an outlet for a new generation of scholars practising the "new labour and working-class history," influenced by the work of E. P. Thompson and the Marxist tradition. He edited the journal from 1976 to 1997, when Bryan Palmer took over as editor. He returned briefly in 2016–17 as a co-editor, first with Bryan Palmer and then with Charles Smith. The journal, published by the Canadian Committee on Labour History, also produced books in the field under the CCLH imprint, many of which Kealey has edited. Kealey and his peers also co-operatively ran New Hogtown Press, a successor to the earlier Hogtown Press, publishing a number of books and left-wing pamphlets in the 1970s and 1980s in an attempt to provide a model of a non-profit socialist enterprise within a capitalist society.
Returning to Toronto after his doctoral studies in 1972, Kealey worked on his dissertation and his partner, fellow labour historian Linda Kealey, commenced her own PhD work at the University of Toronto, initially under the supervision of Jill Ker Conway. They moved to Halifax in 1974, where he began his academic career as an assistant professor of history at Dalhousie University and then moved to Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1981, where he served as university research professor and later as dean of the school of graduate studies. While in St. John's, Kealey wrote a regular labour column for the Telegram newspaper. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1999. [3]
In 2001, Kealey was appointed vice-president (research) at the University of New Brunswick, relocating to Fredericton. He assumed the role of provost of the university in 2008, holding both positions until 2012, while serving on the boards of a number of organizations and spearheading the university's rapidly expanding research activities, including successful commercialization efforts. In 2017 Kealey was awarded the Order of Canada.
Focusing on research as professor of history, Kealey co-authored with Reg Whitaker and Andy Parnaby the book Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America in 2012, which won the CFHSS's Canada Prize for the Social Sciences and an Honourable Mention for the Macdonald Prize of the Canadian Historical Association. It was also shortlisted for the JW Dafoe Book Prize and the Smiley Prize of the Canadian Political Science Association. He also co-edited the book Debating Dissent (2012), a collection of essays on Canada in the 1960s. He travelled to Australia and New Zealand in 2013 as a visiting scholar at Monash and Massey universities, which reflects his significant scholarly associations on three continents. He returned to Massey as a visiting fellow in 2015. In 2017 the University of Toronto Press published his collection of essays, Spying on Canadians.
Kealey has supervised more than 20 PhDs to completion at Dalhousie, MUN and UNB, including Craig Heron, John Manley, Sean Cadigan, Mark Leier, Christina Burr, Michael Smith, Miriam Wright, Andrew Parnaby, Dominique Clement, Michelle McBride, Janis Thiessen, Michael Butt, Fred Winsor, Richard Rennie, Kurt Korneski, Kirk Niergarth, Benjamin Isitt, Christopher Powell, David Foord and William Vinh-Doyle. He served on the scientific advisory committee of the Council of Canadian Academies and served on the finance committee of the Royal Society of Canada. He also continues to serve as treasurer and chair of the publications committee of the Canadian Committee on Labour History. In addition he is a member of the board of the Fergusson Foundation, which is dedicated to combating family violence.
The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was one of the most famous and influential strikes in Canadian history. For six weeks, May 15 to June 26, more than 30,000 strikers brought economic activity to a standstill in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which at the time was Canada's third largest city. In the short term, the strike ended in arrests, bloodshed, and defeat, but in the long run it contributed to the development of a stronger labour movement and the tradition of social democratic politics in Canada.
Leo Victor Panitch was a distinguished research professor of political science and a Canada Research Chair in comparative political economy at York University. From 1985 until the 2021 edition, he served as co-editor of the Socialist Register, which describes itself as "an annual survey of movements and ideas from the standpoint of the independent new left". Panitch himself saw the Register as playing a major role in developing Marxism's conceptual framework for advancing a democratic, co-operative and egalitarian socialist alternative to capitalist competition, exploitation, and insecurity.
The Canadian Historical Association is a Canadian organization founded in 1922 for the purposes of promoting historical research and scholarship. It is a bilingual, not-for-profit, charitable organization, the largest of its kind in Canada. According to the Association, it "seeks to encourage the integration of historical knowledge and perspectives in both the scholarly and public spheres, to ensure the accessibility of historical resources, and to defend the rights and freedoms of emerging and professional historians in the pursuit of historical inquiry as well as those of history degree holders who utilize the analytical, research, communication, and writing skills they acquired during their studies to pursue a variety of career paths inside or outside of academia."
Albert Edward Smith, known as A. E. Smith, was a Canadian religious leader and politician. A social gospeller, Smith was for many years a minister in the Canadian Methodist Church before starting his own "People's Church". He served in the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba from 1920 to 1922 as a Labour representative. In 1925, he became a member of the Communist Party of Canada.
Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey, was a Canadian educator, poet, anthropologist, ethno-historian, and academic administrator.
This is a bibliography of major works on the History of Canada.
Elena Miller, originally known as Yelena Borisovna Olshanskaya, is a Russian who, as alleged by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), lived in Canada as a spy, using the name of a dead child as a cover. Olshanskaya later lost the right to immigrate back to Canada to live with her second husband, Canadian Peter Miller.
Craig Heron is a Canadian social historian and public intellectual with a broad interest in labour and cultural history. A former president of the Canadian Historical Association, he is a professor emeritus at York University.
New Hogtown Press was a Canadian left-wing publisher active during the 1970s and 1980s.
The Canadian Socialist League (CSL) was the first nationwide socialist organization founded in Canada. It originated in Montreal in 1898, but was strongest in Ontario and British Columbia. The leaders espoused a moderate socialism based on Christian reform principles. Members of the league formed provincial socialist parties. In 1905 these parties merged into the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC).
Colonel Charles Frederick Hamilton (1879–1933) was a Canadian intelligence officer and newspaper journalist.
Josaphat Brunet (1902-1974) was a senior police officer in Canada. In 1956 he was the founding director of the RCMP Security Service. In 1958 he was promoted to Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Following his retirement from the RCMP he became, briefly, the director of Security for the National Bank of Canada. Later in 1960 he was appointed Director General of the Sûreté du Québec, a post he held for five years.
Bower Featherstone was a Canadian civil servant who was convicted of espionage in 1966.
George Weston Wrigley (1847–1907) was a Canadian journalist and social reformer. He was a believer in the Social Gospel and was an opponent of industrial capitalism, which he blamed for many social ills. He was the editor of several newspapers that promoted reform in the later part of the 19th century.
Thomas Phillips Thompson was an English-born journalist and humorist who was active in the early socialist movement in Canada.
Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-72 is a 2011 book written by Ben Isitt and published by University of Toronto Press.
Harry Clare Pentland was a Canadian economic historian. Pentland studied labour and economic history. He served as president of the Manitoba Historical Society from 1963 to 1965. In 1970, the MHS awarded him a Manitoba Centennial Medal. His papers are held at the University of Manitoba. Archives.
The Toronto Typographical Union (TTU) was an early Canadian trade union in the printing industry. Founded in 1832, it came to prominence in 1872 when it organized a major strike in Toronto. Membership declined in the mid- to late-20th century as printing turned digital. By 1994, TTU had been absorbed by the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada.
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Who Killed Canadian History? is a 1998 book by Canadian historian J. L. Granatstein. The book argues that Canadians lack national unity because of their failure to teach their country's history. Granatstein contends that multiculturalism, social historians and weak history teaching standards are responsible for Canada's lack of a historical narrative. He advocates for a greater emphasis on the study of Canadian history in schools and university history departments, especially political and military history.