Marc Egnal
Marc Egnal (born December 11, 1943) is an American writer and historian. He writes about the American Revolution, the Civil War, economics, Canadian history, and also novels and art.
He grew up in Philadelphia and studied at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1965. He then studied the Revolutionary era at the University of Wisconsin with Merrill Jensen. In 1968–1969 he spent a year at the University of London on a Fulbright.
In 1970 he moved to Toronto to teach at York University, where he worked until his retirement in 2015. He is married to Judith Humphrey, and they have two sons and four grandchildren.
Egnal is the author of six books. His first book is A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1988). He then wrote Divergent Paths: How Culture and Institutions Have Shaped North American Growth (Oxford University Press, 1996) and New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada (Oxford University Press, 1998). His next major work is The Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (Hill and Wang, 2009), which argues that the different economies of the North and South helped cause the Civil War. After years of research, he published A Mirror for History: How Novels and Art Reflect the Evolution of Middle-Class America (University of Tennessee Press, 2024). In 2025 he published Challenging the Myths of US History: Seven Short Essays on the Past & Present (University of California Press). In retirement he has also written ten short stories for small literary journals.
His website is www.marcegnal.com.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 08:04 (CET).