Item MS-2-423, SF Box 94, Folder 1 - Responsible government in Nova Scotia : [manuscript]

Walter Ross Livingston was the author of Responsible Government in Nova Scotia: A Study of the Constitutional Beginnings of the British Commonwealth (University of Iowa Press, 1930). Born 14 October 1893 in Miller County, Missouri, he started teaching in rural schools in the Ozark Mountains four years before he graduated from high school. Following military service, in 1919 Livingston graduated from Knox College with an AB, earning a graduate degree from the University of Missouri in 1920. In 1923, following three years of teaching at Pomona College, he took up a doctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin. He spent summers at the Canadian Archives in Ottawa researching responsible government in the Canadian provinces, with a focus on Nova Scotia.
Livingston was hired to teach Canadian history and American foreign relations at the University of Iowa, where he also built a collection of government documents, with a focus on those pertaining to the British Commonwealth. He was eventually appointed "Curator of British Documents." Inspired by his PhD dissertation, Livingston wrote Responsible Government in Nova Scotia; in 1931, he published Responsible Government in Prince Edward Island: A Triumph of Self-Government Under the Crown.
Livingston died 30 December 1978 in Coralville, Iowa.