[6] Through his championing of so-called "limited identities", Cook contributed to the rise of the New Social History, which uses "class, gender and ethnicity" as its three main categories of analysis.
Cook's conception of "limited identities" was famously formulated in an article in the International Journal in 1967, Canada's centenary year, reviewing the state of contemporary scholarship on Canadian nationalism: After six new books on the great Canadian problem — our lack of unity and identity — are we getting any nearer the source of the problem?
[7]During his teaching career, Cook supervised the work of 39 PhD students and many prominent social historians such as Franca Iacovetta.
He publicly supported Pierre Elliott Trudeau in his successful attempt to gain the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada in 1968.
[6] Cook received the Governor General's Award for non-fiction in 1985 for The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada.