Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America

Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America offers a series of fresh perspectives on one of the most familiar themes - the nation's encounter with Catholicism - in nineteenth-century American history. 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, the transformation of gender roles in the American family, and the place of slavery in an ostensibly democratic polity 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: Jon Gjerde
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 01/23/2012
Pages: 292
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 9.25h x 6.16w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9780521279666

Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2012

About the Author
Kang, S. Deborah: - S. Deborah Kang is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a specialist in the areas of American legal, western and immigration history and the author of The Legal Construction of the Borderlands: The INS, Immigration Law, and Immigrant Rights on the U.S.-Mexico Border, which will be published in 2012.Gjerde, Jon: - Jon Gjerde (February 25, 1953-October 26, 2008) was an American historian and the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he also served as chair of the History Department and Dean of the Division of Social Sciences in the College of Letters and Science. He is the author of the award-winning From Peasants to Farmers: The Migration from Balestrand, Norway, to the Upper Middle West and The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917.