Voice of the Vanishing Minority: Robert Sellar and the Huntingdon Gleaner, 1863-1919

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Voice of the Vanishing Minority: Robert Sellar and the Huntingdon Gleaner, 1863-1919
Abstract
The Scottish-born Robert Sellar (1841-1919), editor of the Huntingdon Gleaner, devoted his journalistic career to the cause of the disappearing rural English-speaking Quebec. A nineteenth-century liberal, Sellar was committed to the separation of church and state. He fought to remove the Catholic Church’s state-sanctioned taxing powers from those parts of Quebec granted in English freehold tenure. He believed that the Catholic Church was encouraging French Canadians to buy out English-speaking Protestant farmers in the townships so that the Church could increase its ability to collect tithes. The author points out that Sellar's provocative views were shared by grass-roots supporters in Ontario and the Prairies but were largely dismissed as Anglo-Protestant francophobia and bigotry. Sellar's one-man crusade for English rights in Quebec, a crusade for which he endured obloquy, legal harassment, physical violence, arson, clerical condemnation, loss of family, and the indifferent support of the people he was championing.
Date
1998
Publisher
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Place
Montreal and Kingston
# of Pages
xii-378p.
ISBN
978-0-7735-6725-2
Language
en
Citation
Hill, Robert. Voice of the Vanishing Minority: Robert Sellar and the Huntingdon Gleaner, 1863-1919. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998.
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