Desmond Morton (historian)

Professor Desmond Morton, OC , Ph.D. , FRSC is a Canadian historian who specializes in the history of the Canadian military, as well as the history of Canadian political and industrial relations.

Morton is a graduate of the Collège Militaire Royal de St-Jean, the Royal Military College of Canada, the University of Oxford where he received his PhD and the London School of Economics. He spent ten years in the Canadian Army prior to beginning his teaching career.

Morton is the Hiram Mills professor of History at McGill University, as well as the past director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, in Montreal, Quebec. Prior to that, he was Principal of Erindale College, University of Toronto, from 1986 to 1994.

Morton received his doctorate from the University of London. He is the author of over thirty-five books on Canada, including the popular A Short History of Canada ISBN 0-7710-6509-4.

In 1996, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. One of his well known quotes is: "For Canadians, Vimy Ridge was a nation building experience. For some, then and later, it symbolized the fact that the Great War was also Canada's war of independence..."