Richard Alexander Allen (February 10, 1929 – March 5, 2019) was an historian and former politician in Ontario, Canada. He sat as a New Democratic Party member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1982 to 1995, and was a cabinet minister in the government of Bob Rae. Background Allen was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto, a Master's Degree from the University of Saskatchewan and a Ph.D. from Duke University. He was a professor at the University of Regina from 1964 to 1974 where he initiated interdisciplinary prairie studies and founded the Canadian Plans Research Centre. He taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario as senior Canadian historian from 1974 to 1987. He and his wife Nettie have two children. Historian Allen's career began with history and he specialized in Christian socialism within Canada. In 1971, he published a work entitled The Social Passion, chronicling the history of the Canadian social gospel from the 1890s to 1929. In the book he proposed that the social gospel supplied the reform movement with a type of ideology. He said it ultimately failed because the concept translated poorly between English and Canadian society and that the structure of the churches did not lend itself to promoting social change. The book was criticized because it focused too strongly on central Canada and ignored trends in the Maritimes and Western Canada. In addition to The Social Passion, Allen has published Region of the Mind: Interpreting the Western Canadian Plains (1973), Religion and society in the prairie west (1975) and Man and Nature on the Prairie (1976), and was the editor of a collection entitled The Social Gospel in Canada (1975). In 1998 he published a family history, "Sun Bright and Well Beloved: Three Hundred Years of a North American Family and their Farther Past," hailed in the Canadian Historical Review as setting a new standard for family history in Canada. He has also written several articles on Salem Bland, a prominent Canadian Christian socialist (1859–1950). In 2008 Allen published volume one of his biography of Salem Bland, The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity. List of works The Social Passion, 1971 Region of the Mind: Interpreting the Western Canadian Plains, 1973 Religion and society in the prairie west, 1975 Man