Catholics in the American Century (PDF)

Over the course of the twentieth century, Catholics, who make up a quarter of the population of the United States, made significant contributions to American culture, politics, and society. They built powerful political machines in Chicago, Boston, and New York; led influential labor unions; created the largest private school system in the nation; and established a vast network of hospitals, orphanages, and charitable organizations. Yet in both scholarly and popular works of history, the distinctive presence and agency of Catholics as Catholics is almost entirely absent.

In this book, R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings bring together American historians of race, politics, social theory, labor, and gender to address this lacuna, detailing in cogent and wide-ranging essays how Catholics negotiated gender relations, raised children, thought about war and peace, navigated the workplace and the marketplace, and imagined their place in the national myth of origins and ends. A long overdue corrective, Catholics in the American Century restores Catholicism to its rightful place in the American story.

Contributors: R. Scott Appleby, University of Notre Dame; Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University; Kathleen Sprows Cummings, University of Notre Dame; R. Marie Griffith, Washington University in St. Louis; David G. Gutiérrez, University of California, San Diego; Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; John T. McGreevy, University of Notre Dame; Robert Orsi, Northwestern University; Thomas Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania

R. Scott Appleby is Professor of History and the John M. Regan Jr. Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation and 'Church and Age Unite!': The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism.CummingsKathleen Sprows:

Kathleen Sprows Cummings is Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholic Identity in the Progressive Era.