J. Fred MacDonald

John Frederick MacDonald is a retired Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University, and an archivist of historical films . He lives in Chicago with his wife, Leslie.

MacDonald was born in New Waterford, Nova Scotia, Canada a small coal-mining town on Cape Breton Island (March 14, 1941). His parents, Murray Dodd MacDonald and Caroline Pinkerton MacDonald, migrated to the United States in 1944: first to Boston, then in 1946 to Hawthorne, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. He was educated in local public schools, graduating from Leuzinger High School (in neighboring Lawndale, California) in 1959.

He received a BA in history in 1963 anda MA in 1964, both from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the Peace Corps in 1964 and was trained at Columbia Teachers College for educational service in Nigeria. Returning to California, he entered the University of California at Los Angeles as a graduate student in European history.

In 1967 he was granted a Fulbright Fellowship, and was the first American scholar to have access to the personal papers of Théophile Delcassé, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs 1898-1905. This resulted in his doctoral thesis, "Camille Barrère and the Conduct of Delcassian Diplomacy in Italy 1898-1902." He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1969.

MacDonald was appointed Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University in 1969, and remained there until early retirement in 1996.

He began as a scholar of European history, but in the early 1970s, shifted interest to the history of U.S. popular culture, then a new field for scholarly inquiry. He became a pioneer academic authority on the history of U.S. broadcasting, writing:

He also edited a volume of radio dramas from the notable African-American Chicago writer, Richard Durham, published as Richard Durham's Destination Freedom. According to WorldCat ], the book is held in 415 libraries [

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