John A. Hill

John Alexander Hill (February 22, 1858 – January 24, 1916) was a co-founder of the McGraw-Hill Book Company, the predecessor corporation of today's McGraw Hill Financial and McGraw-Hill Education. He was born in Sandgate, Vermont on Feb. 22, 1858.

In the 1880s, prior to entering the publishing business, he'd owned and operated machine shops and been a railroad engineer. Beginning in 1888, Hill worked as an editor at Locomotive Engineer. Over the next few years he would produce several technical and trade publications. In 1896 he became president of the American Machinist Press.

He formed his own company, The Hill Publishing Company, in 1902. From 1900 to 1902 he served as mechanical engineer for the General Manifold Company, custom-designing machinery. As head of Hill Publishing he printed five weekly magazines: American Machinist,Power,Engineering News,The Engineering and Mining Journal, and Coal Age.

Hill had known James H. McGraw, who had established The McGraw Publishing Company in 1899, for some time and the two men shared similar interests. In 1909 they agreed upon an alliance and combined the book departments of their publishing companies into The McGraw-Hill Book Company. Hill served as president of this combined company from 1909 to 1916, the year he died unexpectedly of a heart condition.

John A. Macdonald

Sir John Alexander Macdonald GCB KCMG PC PC QC (11 January 1815 – 6 June 1891) was a Canadian politician and Father of Confederation who was the first Prime Minister of Canada (1867–1873, 1878–1891). The dominant figure of Canadian Confederation, he had a political career which spanned almost half a century. He drank heavily, and in 1873 was voted out during the Pacific Scandal, in which his party took bribes from businessmen seeking the contract to build the Pacific Railway. Macdonald's greatest achievements were building and guiding a successful national government for the new Dominion, using patronage to forge a strong Conservative Party, promoting the protective tariff of the National Policy, and building the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway. Economic growth was slow during his years in office, as Canada verged on stagnation; many residents migrated to the fast-growing United States. He fought to block provincial efforts to take power back from Ottawa. His most controversial move was to approve the execution of Métis leader Louis Riel for treason in 1885; it permanently alienated the Francophones who saw themselves humiliated.