Brokers of Culture: Italian Jesuits in the American West, 1848-1919

by Gerald McKevitt

Overview

Brokers of Culture examines the interactions among multiple ethnic groups in the American West and a group of nearly four hundred Italian Jesuits who emigrated to the United States after 1848 in the wake of the Italian unification movement. The first wave of exiles taught in Jesuit colleges on the East Coast, where they played a major role in reforming American seminary education. From their eastern base, the dispersed clerics moved to the frontier, shaping the evolution of culture in eleven western states. The Jesuits' most powerful source of influence was their western colleges, which adhered to educational traditions brought from Europe while simultaneously meeting the needs of an ethnically mixed and mobile frontier population.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804753579
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	12/14/2006
Edition description:	1
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gerald McKevitt is Ignacio Ellacuría SJ Professor of Jesuit Studies at Santa Clara University. He is author of The University of Santa Clara: A History, 1851-1977 (Stanford UniversityPress, 1979).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations     ix
Preface     xiii
Introduction: The Jesuits     1
"Out with the Jesuits": Becoming Refugees     14
"Instant Despatch": The Ideology of Emigration     36
"Witnesses to Shortcomings": Reforming Jesuit America     61
"Attracted Toward Remote Lands": Becoming Western Missionaries     91
"Methods Adopted by Us": The Art of Indian Conversion     120
"Habits of Industry and Useful Toil": Native American Education     150
"The Darkest Part of the U.S.A.": The Southwest     178
"Who Could Have Done Anything Like This in Italy?": The Colleges     208
"Our Pen Is at Your Service": Mediating Cultures     234
"A Delicate State of Transition": Jesuits Divided     264
"Sic Transit Gloria Mundi": Foreign No More     296
Conclusion     320
Abbreviations     329
Notes     331
Glossary     395
Index     397

Editorial Reviews

"Brokers of Culture is a magisterial treatment that will attract a great deal of attention."

Pacific Historical Review - James Carroll

"This is a fascinating study about the work of Italian Jesuits in the western part of the United States in the seventy or so years following the European revolutions of 1848 McKevitt proves himself an exceptional scholar by concretizing the threefold task of the historian in finding the sources, evaluating the sources, and writing his own history in this, his latest work."

Archivum Historicum

"This work has been widely researched in American and European archives. It is clearly organized and well written, and it will be read with profit by historians of culture, of immigration, of American Catholicism, of Native Americans, and of the American West."

Western Historical Quarterly

"This is an essential book for Pacific Northwest historians."

From the Publisher

"Brokers of Culture is a masterpiece that closes a gap in our understanding of American Catholic and Jesuit history. In these pages, Gerald McKevitt models the ideal of eloquentia perfecta—articulate wisdom—that his historical subjects journeyed so far to represent."

Conversations in Jesuit Higher Education

"With its attention to individual stories and international connections, Brokers of Culture will be most useful to scholars of Catholic—especially Jesuit—history and missiology. In fleshing out and bringing together the story of the Jesuits in multiple Western regions, it will also be a valuable reference for students of religion in the American West more broadly."

Church History

"McKevitt rescues from an undeserved oblivion those who never made it back to their homelands."

California History

"McKevitt's is an exemplary work of historical scholarship a wonderful example of mature American Catholic historical scholarship."

Theological Studies - David O'Brien

"Brokers of Culture is superb, a major study that will shape the next generation of scholarship in Western and religious history."

America Magazine

"A major study that will shape the next generation of scholarship in Western and religious history."

America - John McGreevy

"The role of Italian Jesuits in the spiritual, intellectual, and scientific growth of the nineteenth century American West may come as a surprise, but Father McKevitt provides a readable approach to an intriguing chapter in American history."

First Things - Michael P. Morris

"Brokers of Culture is a wonderful example of mature American Catholic historical scholarship. Always fully informed and scrupulously fair, McKevitt admires his Jesuit subjects but offers well-argued criticism when appropriate. He has a wonderful story, he tells it well, and he has enriched our understanding of American Catholic history."

Theological Studies

"McKevitt is the most knowledgeable historian of Jesuit activity in the nineteenth-century trans-Mississippi West... Remarkable book."

Oregon Historical Quarterly

"[Brokers of Culture] provides detailed accounts of the Jesuit educational initiatives among both Native American and Hispanic populations, and it carefully traces how the Jesuit' missionary work was molded by shifts in U.S. Indian policy. It is a significant contribution to what has been termed the 'new western history' and its commitment to the study of previously neglected or undervalued groups and individuals."

Journal of American History