Explore the vast range of titles available.

\"[This book] looks at efforts of America's Democratic Party and Catholic leadership to use the service of immigrant volunteers in the U.S.-Mexican War as a weapon against nativism and anti-Catholicism\"--Jacket.

The mixture of hostility and fascination with which native-born Protestants viewed the \"foreign\" practices of the \"immigrant\" church is the focus of Jenny Franchot's cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America. Franchot analyzes the effects of religious attitudes on historical ideas about America's origins and destiny. She then focuses on the popular tales of convent incarceration, with their Protestant \"maidens\" and lecherous, tyrannical Church superiors. Religious captivity narratives, like those of Indian captivity, were part of the ethnically, theologically, and sexually charged discourse of Protestant nativism. Discussions of Stowe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell-writers who sympathized with \"Romanism\" and used its imaginative properties in their fiction-further demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Through a fascinating discussion of religion's role in the rhetoric of American civilizing empire, The Imperial Church undertakes an exploration of how Catholic mission histories served as a useful reference for Americans narrating US settler colonialism on the North American continent and seeking to extend military, political, and cultural power around the world. Katherine D. Moran traces historical celebrations of Catholic missionary histories in the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the US colonial Philippines to demonstrate the improbable centrality of the Catholic missions to ostensibly Protestant imperial endeavors. Moran shows that, as the United States built its continental and global dominion and an empire of production and commerce in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Protestant and Catholic Americans began to celebrate Catholic imperial pasts. She demonstrates that American Protestants joined their Catholic compatriots in speaking with admiration about historical Catholic missionaries: the Jesuit Jacques Marquette in the Midwest, the Franciscan Junípero Serra in Southern California, and the Spanish friars in the Philippines. Comparing them favorably to the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the American Revolutionary generation, commemorators drew these missionaries into a cross-confessional pantheon of US national and imperial founding fathers. In the process, they cast Catholic missionaries as gentle and effective agents of conquest, uplift, and economic growth, arguing that they could serve as both origins and models for an American civilizing empire. The Imperial Church connects Catholic history and the history of US empire by demonstrating that the religious dimensions of American imperial rhetoric have been as cross-confessional as the imperial nation itself.

The 1960 presidential election, won ultimately by John F. Kennedy, was one of the closest and most contentious in American history. The country had never elected a Roman Catholic president, and the last time a Catholic had been nominated—New York Governor Al Smith in 1928—he was routed in the general election. From the outset, Kennedy saw the religion issue as the single most important obstacle on his road to the White House. He was acutely aware of, and deeply frustrated by, the possibility that his personal religious beliefs could keep him out of the White House. This book tells the fascinating story of how the Kennedy campaign transformed the “religion question” from a liability into an asset, making him the first (and still only) Catholic president. Drawing on archival research, including many never-before-seen documents, the book travels inside the campaign to show Kennedy's chief advisors—Ted Sorensen, John Kenneth Galbraith, Archibald Cox—grappling with the staunch opposition to the candidate's Catholicism. The book also reveals many of the Nixon campaign's efforts to tap in to anti-Catholic sentiment, with the aid of Billy Graham and the National Association of Evangelicals, among others. The alliance between conservative Protestants and the Nixon campaign, it shows, laid the groundwork for the rise of the Religious Right.

Crosses, candles, choir vestments, and stained glass are common church features found in nearly all mainline denominations of American Christianity today. Most Protestant churchgoers would be surprised to learn, however, that at one time these elements were viewed with suspicion as foreign implements associated strictly with the Roman Catholic Church. Blending history with the study of material culture, Ryan K. Smith sheds light on the ironic convergence of anti-Catholicism and the Gothic Revival movement in nineteenth-century America. Smith finds the source for both movements in the sudden rise of Roman Catholicism after 1820, when it began to grow from a tiny minority into the country's largest single religious body. Its growth triggered a corresponding rise in anti-Catholic activities. At the same time, Catholic worship increasingly attracted young, genteel observers around the country. Its art and its tangible access to the sacred meshed well with the era's romanticism and market-based materialism. Smith argues that these tensions led Protestant churches to break with tradition and adopt recognizably Latin art. He shows how architectural and artistic features became tools through which Protestants adapted to America's new commercialization while simultaneously defusing the potent Catholic \"\"threat.\"\" The results presented a colorful new religious landscape, but they also illustrated the durability of traditional religious boundaries.

In Devotion to the Adopted Country, Tyler V. Johnson looks at the efforts of America's Democratic Party and Catholic leadership to use the service of immigrant volunteers in the U.S.–Mexican War as a weapon against nativism and anti-Catholicism. Each chapter focuses on one of the five major events or issues that arose during the war, finishing with how the Catholic and immigrant community remembered the war during the nativist resurgence of the 1850s and in the outbreak of the Civil War. Johnson's book uncovers a new social aspect to military history by connecting the war to the larger social, political, and religious threads of antebellum history. Having grown used to the repeated attacks of nativists upon the fidelity and competency of the German and Irish immigrants flooding into the United States, Democratic and Catholic newspapers vigorously defended the adopted citizens they valued as constituents and congregants. These efforts frequently consisted of arguments extolling the American virtues of the recent arrivals, pointing to their hard work, love of liberty, and willingness to sacrifice for their adopted country. However, immigrants sometimes undermined this portrayal by prioritizing their ethnic and/or religious identities over their identities as new U.S. citizens. Even opportunities seemingly tailor-made for the defenders of Catholicism and the nation's adopted citizens could go awry. When the supposedly well-disciplined Irish volunteers from Savannah brawled with soldiers from another Georgia company on a Rio Grande steamboat, the fight threatened to confirm the worst stereotypes of the nation's new Irish citizens. In addition, although the Jesuits John McElroy and Anthony Rey gained admirers in the army and in the rest of the country for their untiring care for wounded and sick soldiers in northern Mexico, anti-Catholic activists denounced them for taking advantage of vulnerable young men to win converts for the Church. Using the letters and personal papers of soldiers, the diaries and correspondence of Fathers McElroy and Rey, Catholic and Democratic newspapers, and military records, Johnson illuminates the lives and actions of Catholic and immigrant volunteers and the debates over their participation in the war. Shedding light on this understudied and misunderstood facet of the war with Mexico, Devotion to the Adopted Country adds to the scholarship on immigration and religion in antebellum America, illustrating the contentious and controversial process by which immigrants and their supporters tried to carve out a place in U.S. society.

In Devotion to the Adopted Country , Tyler V.Johnson looks at the efforts of America's Democratic Party and Catholic leadership to use the service of immigrant volunteers in the U.S.-Mexican War as a weapon against nativism and anti-Catholicism.

Based on careful work with rare archival sources, this book fills a gap in the history of New York Catholicism by chronicling anti-Catholic feeling in pre-Revolutionary and early national periods. Colonial New York, despite its reputation for pluralism, tolerance, and diversity, was also marked by severe restrictions on religious and political liberty for Catholics. The logic of the American Revolution swept away the religious barriers, but Anti-Federalists in the 1780s enacted legislation preventing Catholics from holding office and nearly succeeded in denying them the franchise. The latter effort was blocked by the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, who saw such things as an impediment to a new, expansive nationalist politics. By the early years of the nineteenth century, Catholics gained the right to hold office due to their own efforts in concert with an urban-based branch of the Republicans, which included radical exiles from Europe. With the contributions of Catholics to the War of 1812 and the subsequent collapse of the Federalist Party, by 1820 Catholics had become a key part of the triumphant Republican coalition, which within a decade would become the new Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren.Jason K. Duncan is Assistant Professor of History at Aquinas College.