Robert W. Passfield is a history graduate of the University of Western Ontario (Honours History, 1968) and of McMaster University (MA, 1969), where he pursued Ph.D. studies in Canadian History and three minor fields: political philosophy, modern European history and diplomatic history. In graduate school he undertook to prepare a dissertation on 'The Upper Canadian Tory Mind', which was to focus on the Anglican Tories of the Province of Upper Canada (Ontario) in the post-War of 1812 period. After a forty-year hiatus, that abortive thesis was incorporated into a book, The Upper Canadian Anglican Tory Mind: A Cultural Fragment (2018), to which the present volume is a companion. Passfield is an advocate of a cultural-values approach to the writing of history. To truly understand an historical period, an historian must enter the minds of the protagonists to comprehend their respective principles, values and beliefs within the context of their existing condition and circumstance, as it is the 'ideas' of the protagonists that informed their outlook and actions.
