An authority on French Canadian and English Canadian relations, Ramsay Cook was born in Alameda, Saskatchewan. After receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba in 1954, he went on to Queen's University for his M.A. He continued his studies at the University of Toronto, from which he earned a Ph.D. in 1960. During the 1960s, he wrote a series of essays that brought an encyclopedic knowledge of both French Canadian and English Canadian history to bear on the crisis provoked by Quebec's Quiet Revolution. The essays show how a command of the historical past can enlighten our grasp of the present. Cook, who shares Pierre Trudeau's vision of a bilingual, bicultural Canada… within existing constitutional arrangements, is one of Canada's most distinguished historians. He taught at the University of Toronto and was a visiting professor of Canadian studies at Harvard University. From 1978 to 1983, he served as Chairman of the Institute for Historical Microreproduction. A former editor of the Canadian Historical Review, he also served as editor of both the Canadian Centenary Series and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
François-Marc Gagnon is director and chair of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and a member of the Order of Canada. Nancy Senior is professor emerita in the Department of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Saskatchewan. Réal Ouellet is associate professor in the Département des littératures at the Université Laval.