George MacKinnon Wrong (June 25, 1860 – June 29, 1948) was a Canadian clergyman and historian.
Life and career
Born at
Grovesend
Grovesend ( cy, Pengelli; ) is a village in the community of Grovesend and Waungron ( cy, Pengelli a Waungron), City and County of Swansea in Wales. The community has a population of 1,131.Elgin County, Canada West (now Ontario), he was ordained in the
Anglican
Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition that has developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of th ...
priesthood in 1883 after attending
Wycliffe College
Wycliffe College () is an evangelical graduate school of theology at the University of Toronto. Founded in 1877 as an evangelical seminary in the Anglican tradition, Wycliffe College today attracts students from many Christian denominations from ...
. In 1894, as successor to
Sir Daniel Wilson
Sir Daniel Wilson FSA (Scot) FRSE LLD (January 5, 1816 – August 6, 1892) was a Scottish-born Canadian archaeologist, ethnologist and author.
Life
Wilson was born at 55 Potterow in Edinburgh on 3 January 1816, the son of Archibald Wilson and ...
, he was appointed professor and head of the Department of History at the University of Toronto from which he retired in 1927. He was elected a fellow of the
Royal Society of Canada
The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; french: Société royale du Canada, SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bil ...
in 1908 and received an honorary LLD from McGill University in 1919 and University of Toronto in 1941. Wrong died in Toronto, Ontario on June 29, 1948.
A believer in the historian's moral duty to interpret the past for society's present needs, Wrong viewed Canadian history in terms of the country's British and French origins, and the American presence. As a teacher, administrator, writer and a moving force in the early days of the Canadian Historical Association, he helped to provide an intellectual base for a developing Canadian nationality. In 1896-97 he founded the Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada (since 1920 the Canadian Historical Review) and in 1905 he co-founded the Champlain Society. He wrote numerous monographs and texts on Canadian history, the best being A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs (1908). Formal in habit and something of an anglophile in taste, Wrong influenced a generation of students.
Wrong's eldest son Murray was a long-time friend of Vincent Massey.
He "assumed his ecclesiastical robes" in 1915 to assist in Massey's marriage to Alice Parkin.
Wrong owned a property near Canton, Ontario. Massey bought the adjacent property in 1918 and converted it into his principal residence, Batterwood House, in 1927.
Personal life
In 1886, Wrong married Sophia Hume Blake, the daughter of Edward Blake, Premier of Ontario (1871 to 1872) and leader of the Liberal Party of Canada (1880 to 1887). They had five children:
* Margaret Christian Wrong (1887–1948); educator
* Edward Murray Wrong (1889–1928); historian and Oxford academic
* Harold Verschoyle Wrong (1891–1916); British Army officer, killed in action in the
Battle of the Somme
The Battle of the Somme ( French: Bataille de la Somme), also known as the Somme offensive, was a battle of the First World War fought by the armies of the British Empire and French Third Republic against the German Empire. It took place bet ...
Rosalind Mitchison
Rosalind Mary Mitchison FRSE (11 April 1919 – 19 September 2002) was a 20th-century English historian and academic who specialised in Scottish social history. She was affectionately known as "Rowy" Mitchison.
Life
Rosalind Mary Wrong wa ...
and the physician
Oliver Wrong
Professor Oliver Murray Wrong (7 February 1925 – 24 February 2012) was an eminent academic nephrologist (kidney specialist) and one of the founders of the speciality in the United Kingdom. From a background as a "salt and water" physician, he ma ...
were both grandchildren by Edward Murray Wrong. The sociologist Dennis Wrong was his grandson by Humphrey Hume Wrong.
All of the Wrong children and their father were graduates of the University of Toronto.
Selected works
* ''The Conquest of New France'' (1910)
* ''The Fall of Canada'' (1914)
* ''The United States and Canada: A Political Study'' (1921)
* ''The Rise and Fall of New France'' (1928)
* ''Britain's History'' (1929)
* ''Canada and the American Revolution: The Disruption of the First British Empire'' (1935)
References
Further reading
* Berger, Carl. ''The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing Since 1900'' (2nd ed. 1987), pp 1–31.
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