Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

by William S. Cossen

Overview

In Making Catholic America, William S. Cossen shows how Catholic men and women worked to prove themselves to be model American citizens in the decades between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Far from being outsiders in American history, Catholics took command of public life in the early twentieth century, claiming leadership in the growing American nation. They produced their own version of American history and claimed the power to remake the nation in their own image, arguing that they were the country's most faithful supporters of freedom and liberty and that their church had birthed American independence. Making Catholic America offers a new interpretation of American life in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, demonstrating the surprising success of an often-embattled religious group in securing for itself a place in the national community and in profoundly altering what it meant to be an American in the modern world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501771019
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	222
File size:	24 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

William S. Cossen is a historian specializing in the intersection of religion and nationalism. He is a faculty member of The Gwinett Schoool of Mathematics, Science, and Technology.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Catholic Work of Nation Building
1. Reconstructing the Catholic West: Catholics, Protestants, and the State on the Mission Battlegrounds
2. Catholics in the White City: The Columbian Catholic Congress of 1893
3. American Catholicism and Philippine Colonization: A Study in Religious Imperialism
4. Catholic Gatekeepers: The Church, Immigration, and the Forging of an American Catholicism
5. Toward Tri-Faith America: Catholics Confront the Politics of Anti-Catholicism
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Kathleen Holscher

Making Catholic America skillfully reframes Gilded Age and Progressive Era Catholicism around the confident insistence of white Catholic citizenship. By locating this confidence amid US exceptionalism, imperialism, and boundary-drawing, Cossen invites all of us to take stock of Catholic Americanism and its consequences.

Robert Orsi

In showing how white American Catholics deftly leveraged virulent anti-Catholicism to claim the leading role in establishing Anglo-Saxon Americanism, William S. Cossen opens up important new perspectives on the trajectory of US social and political life since the twentieth century.

Mark Noll

Superb. Coupling exceptionally deep archival research with wide reading in contemporary and historical accounts, Making Catholic America illuminates the complexities of Catholic interaction with American nationalism, Reconstruction, imperialism, and immigration.