Date Published:
August 2004

Biographies of Prominent Quebec and Canadian

Historical Figures

Arthur Reginald Marsden (A. R. M.) Lower

(1889-1988)

Damien-Claude Bélanger,

Department of History,

McGill University

Historian and sailor, was born at Barrie, Ontario. He was educated at the University of Toronto and at Harvard University. During the Great War he served as an officer in the Royal Navy. After completing his doctoral studies, Lower taught history at Tufts College, Massachusetts, at Harvard and at United College, Winnipeg, where he chaired the Department of History for eighteen years. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1941 and served as its president from 1962 to 1963. In 1944 he became professor of History at Queen's University, a position he held until his retirement in 1959. One of Canada's foremost historians, A. R. M. Lower was keenly interested in the staples trade and in Canadian-American relations. He contributed a volume on The North American Assault on the Canadian Forest (1938) to the series of twenty-five studies on Canadian-American relations sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and participated in two of the conferences on Canadian-American affairs organized by the Endowment. A liberal nationalist, Lower outlined his vision of Canadian unity in his widely read Colony to Nation (1946). He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1968. In the wake of the divisions exemplified by the conscription issue in the Second World War, Arthur Lower set out his views in his presidential address to the Canadian Historical Association in a text entitled: " Two Ways of Life: The Primary Antithesis of Canadian History " (Canadian Historical Association, Report, 1943); the essay helped shape the views of English-speaking Canadians on Quebec and French Canadians in the post-war period.

[The views of Lower can be further explored by reading French Canada and National Policy .]