Marc Egnal

Marc Egnal (born December 11, 1943) is an American historian, academic and a professor of history at York University, Toronto, Canada. He completed his B.A. at Swarthmore College in 1965, M.A. in 1967 and Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

He has written on the American Revolution and American Civil War. He is the author of five books on American history including A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (1988); Divergent Paths: How Culture and Institutions Have Shaped North American Growth (1996); and New World Economies:the Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada (1998).

His book, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (2009), argues that "more than any other reason, the evolution of the Northern and Southern economies explains the Civil War."

More recently, Egnal has turned his attention to US novels and the value of Big Data in understanding this literature. See his essay, "Crunching Literary Numbers," in the Gray Matter column of the New York Times, July 12, 2013.

His newest book, A Mirror for History: How Novels and Art Reflect the Evolution of Middle-Class America (2024), argues that culture reflects the arc of economic growth from 1750 to 2020.