My dissertation, “Misremembering Macdonald: Publicity, Silence, and Sexual Abuse in the British Empire,” challenges academic and popular renditions of the life story of “Fighting Mac”—Hector Macdonald—an imperial military hero. Drawing upon letters previously believed destroyed, I reveal that the 1903 scandal surrounding Macdonald’s court martial and suicide was not, as has been speculated, a snobbish English conspiracy against a poor Highlander risen above his station. Nor was Macdonald an “unfortunate homosexual” brought down by an empire overly concerned by consensual relationships between men. Instead, he was investigated because a sixteen-year-old British Ceylonese boy disclosed that Macdonald had sexually abused him and his thirteen-year-old brother. Their classmates later came forward with similar statements.

Engaging with the recent turn in feminist historiography toward histories of sexual abuse, I propose a new, abuse-informed reading of the Fighting Mac case that centers the narratives (and where available, the biographies) of the boys. Attending to twenty-first century calls to believe the accounts of survivors of abuse, I ask what it means for a primary source to be believable. How can historians evaluate “believability” when official records of a celebrity soldier have been destroyed, when key pages of muckraking newspapers are missing from government files, when people with first-hand knowledge have all died? What should we do with a history so unspeakably uncomfortable? What do we do when primary sources insist on speaking distressing truths anyways? And how should we remember perpetrators and survivors of historical abuse?

I am a cultural historian of gender and sexuality, and my methods draw on the fields of literary studies, queer theory, and art history. I am a member of the History Department’s Gender and Sexualities Research Cluster.

Primary advisor: Erika Rappaport

Pronouns: she/her/hers

Misremembering Macdonald: Publicity, Silence, and Sexual Abuse in the British Empire