University Affairs
[timeline_excerpt]McGill was initially not a prestigious academic institution. The school’s infrastructure was decrepit, few courses were taught, and only a handful of degrees were conferred annually. Often instructors could not be compensated and resources like candles and fuel were scarce. These financial problems culminated in the 1850s when McGill buildings had to be evacuated due […]
[timeline_excerpt]William Wright (1827-1908) graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at the age of 20, becoming the first Black medical doctor in British North America. He went on to teach at McGill for thirty years, co-founded and edited the The Medical Chronicle or Montreal Monthly Journal of Medicine & Surgery, and was the Chair of Pharmacology […]
[timeline_excerpt][content warning for racist language] James McGill (1744-1813) was a prominent Scottish merchant who made a fortune trading furs and other goods in the colonial New World. McGill’s will bequeathed £10 000 and his 46-acre Burnside estate to the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning (RIAL), on the condition that they establish a college […]
Long before the founding of McGill or the confederation of Canada, Indigenous peoples resided in the territories on which the university has been constructed. The most famous documentation of Indigenous life on these lands was written in 1535 by French explorer Jacques Cartier, who initiated the colonial project of New France at the behest of King Francis I. On his first voyage, Cartier had kidnapped Dom Agaya and Taignoagny, sons of the chief of Stadacona, a St. Lawrence Iroquoian village located near present day Quebec City. After being ‘exhibited’ in France [Trigger+Pendergast xiii], Dom Agaya and Taignoagny told Cartier of a river that would lead him to the continent’s interior and Iroquois settlement of Hochelaga. During his second voyage, Cartier took their guidance and became the first European to explore the St Lawrence River–a ‘discovery’ regarded as his most significant.