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.
Place
Montreal and Kingston
Publisher
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Date
1998
# of Pages
xii-378p.
Language
en
ISBN
978-0-7735-6725-2
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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