Johns Hopkins University SAIS, U.S.
In her latest book History's People internationally acclaimed historian Margaret MacMillan gives her own personal selection of figures of the past - women and men, some famous and some little-known, who stand out for her. Some have changed the course of history and even directed the currents of their times. Others are memorable for being risk-takers, adventurers, or observers. She looks at the concept of leadership through Bismarck and the unification of Germany; William Lyon MacKenzie King and the preservation of the Canadian Federation; Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the bringing of a unified United States into the Second World War. She also notes how leaders can make huge and often destructive mistakes, as in the cases of Hitler, Stalin, and Thatcher. Richard Nixon and Samuel de Champlain are examples of daring risk-takers who stubbornly went their own ways, often in defiance of their own societies. Then there are the dreamers, explorers, and adventurers, individuals like Fanny Parkes and Elizabeth Simcoe who managed to defy or ignore the constraints of their own societies. Finally, there are the observers, such as Babur, the first Mughal emperor of India, and Victor Klemperer, a Holocaust survivor, who kept the notes and diaries that bring the past to life. History's People is about the important and complex relationship between biography and history, individuals and their times.
MARGARET MACMILLAN
Margaret MacMillan is the Xerox Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs.
Professor MacMillan was the fifth Warden of St Antony's College from July 2007 to September 2017. Prior to taking on the Wardenship, Professor MacMillan was Provost of Trinity College and professor of History at the University of Toronto. She was educated at the University of Toronto (Honours BA in History) and at St Hilda's College and St Antony's College, Oxford University (BPhil in Politics and DPhil). From 1975 until 2002 she was a member of the History Department at Ryerson University in Toronto and she also served as Chair of the Department. Professor MacMillan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Senior Fellow of Massey College, University of Toronto and sits on the boards of the Mosaic Institute, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and the editorial boards of International History and First World War Studies. She has honorary degrees from the University of King's College, the Royal Military College, Ryerson University, Toronto, the University of Western Ontario and Huron University College of the University of Western Ontario. In 2006 Professor MacMillan was invested as an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in 2016 she was appointed as a Companion of the Order of Canada.
Professor MacMillan was a student at St Antony College during the early 1970s, producing a doctoral thesis on the British in India. She returned as a Senior Associate Member in 1993 and was elected to an Honorary Fellowship in 2003.
Professor MacMillan's publications include Women of the Raj as well as Peacemakers: the Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to Make Peace. The latter was published in North America as Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World and won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction (the first woman to do so), the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History, the Silver Medal for the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award and the Governor-General's prize for non-fiction in 2003 and was a New York Times Editor's Choice in 2002. She subsequently wrote Canada's House: Rideau Hall and the Invention of a Canadian Home, jointly with Marjorie Harris and Anne L. Desjardins; Nixon in China: The Week That Changed the World (entitled Nixon and Mao in the US) was nominated in January 2007 for a Gelber Prize, awarded annually to the best book on international affairs published in English; The Uses and Abuses of History (Dangerous Games in the US); Stephen Leacock; and The War That Ended Peace (October 2013). Her most recent book is History's People, published in February 2016. She comments frequently in the media on historical issues and current affairs.
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