Daniel Hickey ‘64, Professor Emeritus of History, Université de Moncton
What did I want to do with a history degree? I put this in the past tense since I’m now 76 years old and have most of my career behind me. I was always attracted to history from my secondary school days. I came from an Irish background and attended St. Dominic High School, a French Canadian institution in Lewiston, Maine. The ethnic composition of my classmates brought me to question how and why different groups immigrated to the U.S. and how they evolved.
I arrived at PC in 1960 and my world history class with Mario DiNunzio exposed me to a myriad of great books that had shaped our civilization: they came from all types of sources. It was a challenge to go deeper into my questioning, reading Aristotle, Dante, John Locke, Karl Marx, and others. In our small classroom in Harkins Hall, these questions were debated by a group of students, many of whom would go on to become important historians, like Frank Hartigan in French history or Bill Joyce in American history.
I went on from PC with my questions piling up to do graduate work at McGill University in Montreal, after which I became a history professor at the French Canadian Université de Moncton. I spent 30 years there teaching European history, continuing my questioning and above all trying to reply to the questions my students posed. Upon retiring in 2004, I moved back to Montreal to work teaching French to Latino immigrants to Québec.
