Offers a series of fresh perspectives on America's encounter with Catholicism in the nineteenth-century. 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, gender roles in the American family, and the place of slavery 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.
- ISBN10 6613598038
- ISBN13 9786613598035
- Publish Date 31 December 2011 (first published 30 December 2011)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 11 September 2012
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Cambridge University Press
- Format eBook
- Language English