Alastair M. Taylor

Alastair MacDonald Taylor (March 12, 1915 – October 15, 2005) was a Canadian historian, filmmaker, United Nations official, professor of geography and political studies, and interdisciplinary thinker. He co-authored the first world-history textbook published in the United States. He played an active role in, and became the leading chronicler of, the diplomatic intervention by the United Nations to secure the independence of Indonesia. He was also among the first to apply systems theory to the historical development of human societies.

Taylor was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1915, the youngest son of Scottish immigrants. In 1930 the family moved to California, where he attended Hollywood High School and then the University of Southern California, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1937. The topic of his Master’s thesis at USC was “The Decline of Scottish Monasticism in the Fifteenth Century”. At age 22 he collaborated with T. Walter Wallbank to begin writing Civilization Past and Present. The first world-history textbook in the United States, and a best-seller since its initial appearance in 1942, it has been published in many editions for over six decades and is familiar to generations of students.[1]

In 1942 Taylor returned to Canada to enlist in the armed forces, but was recruited to the National Film Board in Ottawa, where he worked for pioneering documentary filmmaker John Grierson, making films for the war effort. Taylor himself directed two short films focusing on the situation of Canadian workers in the domestic wartime economy.[2]

Between 1944 and 1952 Taylor worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Washington, D.C. and then for the UN Secretariat in New York City. At UNRRA he was a speechwriter for Herbert Lehman, former governor of New York state, and then for Fiorello La Guardia, former mayor of New York City. Taylor became the Official Spokesman of the Security Council’s United Nations Commission for Indonesia, which oversaw the peace settlement between the Netherlands and its former colony. In this capacity he spent several months in Indonesia in 1949 and 1950 and also attended the Dutch-Indonesian Round Table Conference in The Hague, Netherlands.

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