Leonard J. Arrington
Mormon History Lecture Series
"Predicting the Past: The Utah War's 21st-Century Future."
William P. MacKinnon is an historian, management consultant, and community volunteer who grew up in Schenectady, New York
and Fort Wayne, Indiana. He lives in the village of Montecito, California in Santa Barbara County.
MacKinnon is an alumnus of the Mount Hermon (Massachusetts) School and in 1960 earned a B.A. degree magna cum laude from Yale University,
where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He is a past Chairman of the Yale Library Associates and an Associate Fellow of Yale's Davenport
College. In 1962 MacKinnon received an M.B.A. degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.
As an independent historian MacKinnon's articles, essays, and book reviews on the American West have appeared in more than thirty journals
and encyclopedias since 1963. The first volume of his two-volume study of the Utah War of 1857-1858 (At Sword's Point) was published in 2008
by The Arthur H. Clark Company, an imprint of the University of Oklahoma Press. MacKinnon is an honorary life member of the Utah State
Historical Society and the recipient of its Dale L. Morgan Award. He is also a member of the Western Historical Society, the Organization of
American Historians, the Oregon-California Trails Association, and the Mormon History Association, which has honored him with its Thomas L.
Kane Award and J. Talmage Jones Award.
Since 1988 MacKinnon has been President and Founder of MacKinnon Associates, a strategy consulting firm providing counsel on
organizational and management issues to Boards, CEOs, and other senior officers. Prior to that he was a financial and human resources
executive with General Motors Corporation in New York and Detroit for twenty-five years. During 1982-87 he was vice president in charge of
GM's corporate Personnel Administration and Development Staff. As a management consultant, MacKinnon has served more than seventy public and
privately-held client companies in a wide range of industries while serving on the Board of several such organizations.
As a community volunteer he has been Chairman of the Board of Children's Hospital of Michigan and a Trustee of the Detroit Medical Center
as well as of such educational institutions as the Birmingham, Michigan School Board, Kettering University, the University of Virginia's
Darden School, and the U.S. State Department's Overseas Schools Advisory Council.
MacKinnon served during 1962-68 in squadrons of the New York Air National Guard following active duty with the U.S. Air Force.
For information about the Arrington Lecture, contact Brad Cole at Utah State University, (435) 797-8268.
For more information: 435/797-2663; scweb@ngw.lib.usu.edu
Special Collections & Archives, Merrill Library, Utah State University, Logan Utah 84322-3000
