About Us

It all began with bird seed. James Nicholson, an English immigrant who arrived in Canada in 1891 and made his fortune as a bird seed manufacturer, wanted to give something back to his adopted country. His passion was reading, and he became fascinated by Canadian history ­– so much so that in his youth he would sometimes go without food to buy books. In the course of his reading, he was struck by the fact that Canada lacked something that the United Kingdom possessed – a dictionary of national biography. He set out to give Canada a dictionary of its own and in 1952 bequeathed $3 million to the University of Toronto for the project, the equivalent of more than $30 million today. Nicholson was nothing if not ambitious: the Canadian dictionary, he wrote, should aim “to equal or even surpass” its counterparts elsewhere in the world. And unlike other dictionaries of national biography, it should include not only individuals well known in their fields, but also people from all walks of life. We have followed that guiding principle ever since.

In 1961 the University of Toronto partnered with the Université Laval to ensure that all biographies would be published in both English and French. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography/Dictionnaire biographique du Canada became the major bilingual project in Canadian humanities, and remains so to this day. With the financial support of the federal government and the generosity of individual and institutional donors, the DCB/DBC has published 9,000 biographies, with many more to come. Scholars in Canada and throughout the world have been equally generous, contributing their time and effort to the project for little financial recompense. Drawing largely on primary sources, our biographies range from politicians to public hangmen, suffragists to social workers, cardinals to cult leaders. From the story of a young Indigenous boy who froze to death while on the run from a residential school to that of a mentally ill woman trapped in Toronto’s Asylum for the Insane, the entries reflect a wide variety of Canadian experiences.

Along the way, the DCB/DBC has received several prizes – not least the Governor General’s Award for Popular History (the Pierre Berton Award) in 2012. It has been praised for its coverage, documentation, and quality of writing, for showcasing the lives of people who are not normally included in dominant historical narratives, and for deepening and broadening our understanding of Canadian history.

The DCB/DBC is organized chronologically rather than alphabetically, in a series of volumes that run from the year 1000 to the 20th century. Each volume describes the lives of those whose deaths or last known activities occurred within its designated time frame. Up to and including volume XV (which covers the period 1921–30), the biographies were published in print between 1966 and 2005. The project then evolved into a digital one: all entries are freely available online, with a new one posted weekly (to receive notices, please subscribe to our e-newsletter) as well as minor corrections to a previously published biography, and we have combined the traditional chronological approach with one that encompasses all periods up to the late 20th century. With this increased flexibility, we are in a good position to add significantly to our biographies of women, Indigenous peoples, and racial minorities.

Our mission is not to celebrate or condemn Canadian history, but to provide authoritative and well-written biographies that will help our readers to understand our past, in all its complexity and diversity.