After graduating in history from Victoria College, University of Toronto in 1915, he joined the Canadian Army but was invalided out and taught for a year in a Dukhobor community in Saskatchewan.
A collection of Brown's papers, in particular with reference to his involvement with the Canadian Historical Review, is held in the York University Archives, Toronto.
[4][5] He also actively promoted the development of public archives in both the federal and the provincial governments across Canada,[6][7] and he made this a priority during his term as President of the Canadian Historical Association.
[10] From 1946 to 1953 he continued his editorial work as general editor of the University of Toronto Press, which publishes the CHR and other scholarly publications.
(For a more complete account of the founding of the DCB, see the article on the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and the memoirs of the then Publisher of the University of Toronto Press.
His most enduring academic interest was the emergence of Canada as a society and political entity, initially in North America and then in the wider world.
His early research interests were in the boundary and relationship between Canada and the United States[14][15] and in the political, religious and social development of pre-Confederation Ontario,[16][17][18][19] including the founding of Victoria College.
In response, the passages in question were an effort to depict daily life in New France to students and to balance more traditional accounts that focus on leading historical figures and events.
Brown's later publication of Notre Histoire with Charles Bilodeau, a respected Quebec historian, and his work as founding editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, the leading collaborative effort in Canada between anglophone and francophone historians, are both reflections of his core belief that English and French Canada were founding partners.