Seth Barrett Tillman’s thoughtful remembrance of Professor McDonald:
Professor McDonald was and will remain—long into the distant future—among the most influential historians on American history, particularly in regard to the American Revolution and the Constitution’s framing era. Some people might say he was the most influential historian of his generation. He wrote for both academics and the wider public. He also was part of the recrudescence of pro-Hamiltonian scholarship—not a small achievement considering he did this while writing in 1970s U.S. academia and while teaching in the deepest South.[1] He wrote boldly, and he also experimented with new ideas about the past, including the so-called Celtic hypothesis.
I am not going to describe his vitae or his personal life (about which I know little). These things have been and are being done well in many other forums. Here I want to describe how kind McDonald was to me personally.
Worth reading in full.
“He had the reputation of being stern, sort of Kingsfieldian;”
I almost skipped over that reference, but a couple sentences later remembered the the great John Houseman as Professor Charles Kingsfield.
What a pleasant tale of academic courtesy of an old-fashioned sort.