Plenty of Nothing

Colin Munro MacLeod

Colin Munro MacLeod, who died 50 years ago tomorrow, in 1943 co-designed the Avery-MacLeod-McCarty Experiment that identified DNA as the molecule responsible for bacterial transformation. Source. He was from Port Hastings, Nova Scotia.

Hilary Armstrong

Hilary Armstrong's reappraisal of the Neoplatonist Plotinus elevated that philosopher's status from minor to major. He spent much of his career at the University of Liverpool, but to give himself a break from the university politics there he took a post at Dalhousie University, commuting between England and Nova Scotia through the 1970s. Source.

Bunty McLeod

C. H. "Bunty" McLeod ran the McGill University observatory from 1873 until the First World War. Source.

Lego Irving Finkel

Source.

G.M.A. Grube

G.M.A. Grube (1899-1982) was a classicist at the University of Toronto who specialized in Plato, and you still see his name on the covers of the translations he did for Hackett Publishing, which any used bookstore with a philosophy shelf will have. But he was also a political activist, a member of the League for Social Reconstruction, the editor of their journal Canadian Forum, and he ran for the CCF in the riding of Broadview in Toronto in 1940, 1945, 1949 and 1950. Source. And.

Barbara Kawakami

Barbara Kawakami is an expert on the clothing worn by Japanese agricultural workers in Hawaii. Source. She is the author of Picture Bride, a history of Japanese women sent to Hawaii to marry. Read an article by Kawakami, and watch a video.

McLuhan Interview

Put this interview under your pillow and drift off while Marshall free-associates.

Hilda Petrie, Archaeologist

Hilda Petrie in Egypt. Source.

Helen and Norrie, 1937

This somewhat otherworldly photo of Helen Kemp and Northrop Frye was taken in 1937, the year they were married. McMaster University has an archive of Northrop Frye images here.

Nancy Sandars

You may know N. K. Sandars as the translator of the Penguin Gilgamesh. She was born in 1914, and served in the Second World War as a dispatch courier and in military intelligence. Trained as an archaeologist, she was an expert on Bronze Age France. She lived to be 101. Obit.