Donald Creighton

Donald Grant Creighton, CC (July 15, 1902 – December 19, 1979) was a noted Canadian historian whose major works include The Commercial Empire of the St-Lawrence: 1760-1850 (first published in 1937) a detailed study on the growth of the English merchant class in relation to the St Lawrence River in Canada. His biography of John A. Macdonald, published into two parts between 1952 and 1955, was considered by many Canadian historians as re-establishing biographies as a proper form of historical research in Canada. By the 1960s Creighton began to move towards a more general history of Canada.

Creighton's later years were preoccupied with criticizing the then ruling Liberal Party of Canada under William Lyon Mackenzie King and his successor Louis St-Laurent. Creighton denounced the Liberal Party for undermining Canada's link with Great Britain and moving towards closer relations with the United States, a policy which he strongly disliked. His peers remember a brilliant writer who was a very difficult colleague. One of his biographers says:

Creighton was born in Toronto, to William Black Creighton, a Methodist minister and editor of The Christian Guardian, and Laura Harvie Creighton. He attended Victoria College, in the University of Toronto, where he received his BA in 1925.

He then attended Balliol College at Oxford University, where he received his MA before returning to Canada to teach history, at the University of Toronto for his entire career. Creighton belonged to a generation of English Canadians who were proud of the British Empire, and his anglophilia was often expressed in his books.

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