[1] MacKendrick was born in Taunton, Massachusetts, but most of his productive years had been lived in Madison, Wisconsin.
Future United States President George H. W. Bush was a student of MacKendrick's while he taught at Phillips Academy.
In 1952, he worked with Herbert M. Howe on the publication of Classics in Translation, an anthology of selections by ancient Greek and Roman writers.
He is most widely known for a series of books that utilise the discoveries of archeology to reconstruct the histories of particular cultures or civilizations.
[4] Several additional titles appeared in this series, and by 1980 it had surveyed regions and cultures of almost the entire area of the Roman Empire.