MacNutt, William Stewart

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1975
WILLIAM STEWART MACNUTT
to be Doctor of Letters

The fourth of July has figured prominently in the life of Stewart MacNutt. It has been a point of departure for the man and his scholarship. This distinguished Canadian historian was born on the fourth of July and he has spent much of his academic career pursuing some of the results that have followed upon that famous day in 1776.

He has been widely hailed in Canada and the United States for his pioneering work on those Loyalists who founded New Brunswick and who made the Maritimes for a time the English-speaking center of what would become Canada. When he began his labours on the Loyalists few historians were much interested in the "losers" of the American Revolution and fewer still in the history of the Atlantic Provinces. Today, some three decades later, both Loyalist studies and Atlantic Canada studies flourish. Their health and vitality owe much to him.

His extensive research and writing, his brilliant teaching, and his leadership in helping to draw together the University of London, the City University of New York, the American Antiquarian Society, and UNB in a massive scholarly assault upon establishing the documentary base necessary to assess the place of the Loyalists in the histories of Canada, Britain, and the United States, have transformed a neglected area of research into a thriving scholarly enterprise. As we enter the bicentennial of the Revolution, in an America buffeted by external stresses and wracked by internal strains, the whole question of winners or losers gains fresh meaning and forces newer and more profound interpretations. Did the expulsion of the Loyalists too narrowly constrict the limits of dissent in American society at its revolutionary birth? Was a stifling consensus the price paid for the failure to afford an honourable place in an independent America for those who felt that the severing of a benign connection with Britain was not worth a war, even though they were as keenly aware as the revolutionary leaders of the need for a redress of grievances? To see American historians wrestle anew with these and other questions, to see today a legion of Loyalist scholars where he once stood virtually alone, must be deeply satisfying to Professor MacNutt.

Professor of history, and Dean of Arts at UNB, currently Professor Emeritus; Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Royal Historical Society; his work recognized by the Canada Council, the Nuffield Foundation, and the American Association for State and Local History; recipient of honorary degrees from St. Thomas University, the University of Prince Edward Island, and Dalhousie University, Stewart MacNutt has brought great distinction to us. This institution, founded by the men he has studied for a lifetime, recognizing that like the Loyalists he, too, is a man of honour and deep conviction, bestows upon him today its mark of honor.

Praeses admittit Guilielmum Stewart MacNutt honoris causa ad gradum Doctoris in Litteris.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 2