Photo: Department of History
J. K. (Keith) Johnson, a professor emeritus in the department, passed away suddenly on April 13, 2018. Keith graduated from University of Toronto with an MA in history and worked for the then Public Archives of Canada through the 1960s. He was hired as an Associate Professor of History at St Patrick’s College in 1970, after the merger of St Pat’s with Carleton in 1967 but while the College was still located downtown, soon transferring to the department and to the main campus.
Keith was a specialist in the history of Upper Canada, his first of many articles in Ontario History appearing in 1961. He edited the Centennial compendium edition of the Canadian Directory of Parliament while at the Archives, and some of his earliest publications were about the 1837-38 rebellions, but Keith was interested in the social and economic as well as the political lives of Upper Canadians, both luminaries and minor figures.
He followed two collections of Sir John A. Macdonald’s pre-Confederation letters with Affectionately Yours: The Letters of Sir John A. Macdonald and his Family in 1969 and his influential article “John A. Macdonald: The young non-politician” in 1971. Afterwards, he published “The Businessman as Hero: The Case of William Warren Street” and several others in this vein. This culminated in his prosopographical study Becoming Prominent: Regional leadership in Upper Canada, 1791-1841 (1989). An article on petitioners to the colony’s officialdom appeared in 1995, the year of his retirement.
He was perhaps best known to generations of students for his selection and editorship of Historical Essays on Upper Canada, published by McClelland and Stewart in 1975, and Historical Essays on Upper Canada: New Perspectives, issued by Carleton University Press in 1989. The latter he co-edited with the late Bruce Wilson, a fellow LAC historian. The former collection focused mostly on political and economic history, while the latter (and the editors’ helpful introduction) reflected the shift toward quantitative methods of the new social history, and advances in indigenous, women’s, working class, and legal history and highlighted challenges to the staples and social control theses. In 1998 Keith published a reflection on Gerald Craig’s long-enduring text Upper Canada: The Formative Years.
He continued to research and to publish, with a book-length study of petitioners, In Duty Bound: Men, Women and the State in Upper Canada appearing in 2014 when he was 84. Just last year he published a review of Doug McCalla’s Consumerism in the Bush: Shopping in Rural Upper Canada.
Keith continued to teach his third-year courses on Upper Canada and post-Confederation Ontario, and his senior seminar on Colonial Society in British America, till his retirement. Keith and his wife Jill Vickers, long with Carleton’s Department of Political Science and School of Canadian Studies, lived latterly at Portland in the Rideau Lakes.
Written by Bruce Elliott
Gifts in Keith’s memory will be used to support students in Carleton University’s Department of History through the Professor James Keith Johnson Memorial Fund.
A Memorial to celebrate his life and work will be held on the Carleton campus on Friday, May 25 in Room 2017 of Dunton Tower from 3 to 4:30, followed by a reception. Professor Johnson’s former students, colleagues, friends and neighbours are especially invited to attend.
The parking lot closest to Dunton Tower is lot #1, behind the MacOdrum Library.
An obituary appeared in the April 21 Globe and Mail.