Died 9 April 2015, Los Angeles, California, United States Books Blacks and white TV, Television and the Red men, Who Shot the Sheriff, The Headlong Fury: A N, One nation under television | ||
John Frederick MacDonald is a retired Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University, and an archivist of historical films . He lives in Chicago with his wife, Leslie.
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Biography
MacDonald was born in New Waterford, Nova Scotia, Canada a small coal-mining town on Cape Breton Island (March 14, 1941). His parents, Murray Dodd MacDonald and Caroline Pinkerton MacDonald, migrated to the United States in 1944: first to Boston, then in 1946 to Hawthorne, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. He was educated in local public schools, graduating from Leuzinger High School (in neighboring Lawndale, California) in 1959.
He received a BA in history in 1963 anda MA in 1964, both from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the Peace Corps in 1964 and was trained at Columbia Teachers College for educational service in Nigeria. Returning to California, he entered the University of California at Los Angeles as a graduate student in European history.
In 1967 he was granted a Fulbright Fellowship, and was the first American scholar to have access to the personal papers of Théophile Delcassé, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs 1898-1905. This resulted in his doctoral thesis, "Camille Barrère and the Conduct of Delcassian Diplomacy in Italy 1898-1902." He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1969.
Academic work
MacDonald was appointed Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University in 1969, and remained there until early retirement in 1996.
He began as a scholar of European history, but in the early 1970s, shifted interest to the history of U.S. popular culture, then a new field for scholarly inquiry. He became a pioneer academic authority on the history of U.S. broadcasting,writing:
He also edited a volume of radio dramas from the notable African-American Chicago writer, Richard Durham, published as Richard Durham's Destination Freedom. According to WorldCat ], the book is held in 415 libraries [
He was also: the first curator (1985-1990) of the Museum of Broadcast Communications , President of the Popular Culture Association (1980-1982), producer and host of his own documentary radio series, Journeys at WBEZ, the Chicago outlet of National Public Radio, (1980-1981), originator and General Editor of the Media and Society series of scholarly books (1987-1990) published by Praeger Publishers.
Archival work
He and his wife began in 1972 at their own expense a private archive of vintage pop music, long-forgotten radio programs, and a wide-range of historical 16mm motion pictures that ranged from travel shorts, old silent educational films, and home movies, to corporate sales shorts, filmed and kinescoped TV programs, commercials, and long-forgotten entertainment shorts.
By the end of the 20th century, the Library of Congress termed the MacDonald repository "the most important archive in private hands in the United States." As a result of this interest, he founded J. Fred MacDonald & Associates in 1986 as a private commercial enterprise. The enterprise continued until the end of 2010, when the Library of Congress took physical possession the resources. and shipped it to its Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia.
Blending his interest in historic film and a dedication to education, in 2010 MacDonald created the American Indian Film Gallery, a free website promoting the study of Native American peoples living from the Arctic to the tip of South America. This on-line resource contains 450 vintage films about Indian life between the 1920s and 1970s. After a national search for an appropriate new home, in 2012 he donated the entire website to the University of Arizona which now owns and operates the AIFG.
Other work
MacDonald is the author of 2 novels: The headlong fury: A novel of World War One. (According to WorldCat, only two copies of the booka re held in libraries) and I, Liberal: A Political Fantasy (which is not listed in WorldCat), He also composed two enhanced e-books: in 2009 The History Shoppe, and the following year its sequel, The Code of Clio. These were placed on-line as free e-books. Their purpose was to introduce high school and college students to the methodology of historians who draw their understanding of history from the examination of original source materials.