John P. McKay (died November 24, 2022) born in St. Louis, Missouri, was a professor of history and an author. He received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1961, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1968. He became a professor of history at the University of Illinois in 1976,^[1] where he held the position of Professor Emeritus of history. McKay specialized in modern French history, and nineteenth-century European economic and social history.^[2] McKay died on November 24, 2022, in Champaign, Illinois.

In 1970 McKay won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize for his book Pioneers for Profit: Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian Industrialization, 1885-1913 (1970). He has translated Jules Michelet's The People (1973) and has written Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe (1976), as well as more than a hundred articles, book chapters and reviews. He contributed to Imagining the Twentieth Century (1997), edited by Charles C. Stewart and Peter Fritzsche, as well as Europe, 1789-1914 (2006), edited by John Merriman and Jay Winters.^[1]

Among other publications, McKay has written the textbooks A History of World Societies and A History of Western Society, both published in several editions. A History of Western Society is often used in Advanced Placement European History classes.^[3]