Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America

by Jon Gjerde , Edited by S. Deborah Kang

• ISBN13: 9780521279666
• ISBN10: 0521279666
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-01-23
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America offers a series of fresh perspectives on America's encounter with Catholicism in the nineteenth-century. While religious and immigration historians have construed this history in univocal terms, Jon Gjerde bridges sectarian divides by presenting Protestants and Catholics in conversation with each other. In so doing, Gjerde reveals the ways in which America's encounter with Catholicism was much more than a story about American nativism. Nineteenth-century religious debates raised questions about the fundamental underpinnings of the American state and society: the shape of the antebellum market economy, gender roles in the American family, and the place of slavery were only a few of the issues engaged by Protestants and Catholics in a lively and enduring dialectic. While the question of the place of Catholics in America was left unresolved, the very debates surrounding this question generated multiple conceptions of American pluralism and American national identity.

Author Biography

S. Deborah Kang is an assistant professor in the Department of History at California State University, San Marces, and a former postdoctoral scholar in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vi
Editor's Preface	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
The Protestant Conundrum	p. 20
The Catholic Conundrum	p. 61
Conversion and the West	p. 96
Schools and the State	p. 138
Protestant and Catholic Critiques of Family and Women	p. 176
The American Economy and Social Justice	p. 220
Editor's Epilogue	p. 257
Index	p. 263
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