George Ramsay Cook

George Ramsay Cook was a Canadian historian and general editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. He was professor of history at the University of Toronto, 1958–1968; York University, 1969–1996; Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies, Harvard University, 1968–1969; Visiting Professor, and Yale University, 1978–1979 and 1997. 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. Cook's conception of "limited identities" was famously formulated in an article in the International Journal in 1967, Canada's centenary year, reviewing the state of contemporary scholarship on Canadian nationalism:After six new books on the great Canadian problem — our lack of unity and identity — are we getting any nearer the source of the problem? Undoubtedly something is achieved: if nothing else one can wonder if the search is worth the effort. Certainly we should continue to try to understand ourselves; an unexamined nation is not worth living in. But it may be that the frame of reference is wrong. Perhaps instead of constantly deploring our lack of identity, we should attempt to understand and explain the regional, ethnic and class identities that we do have. It might just be that it is in these limited identities that "Canadianism" is found, and that except for our over-heated nationalist intellectuals, Canadians find this situation quite satisfactory.