Strangers in the Land

Strangers in the Land
Author: John Higham
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2002
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780813531236

"This book attempts a general history of the anti-foreign spirit that I have defined as nativism. It tries to show how American nativism evolved its own distinctive patterns, how it has ebbed and flowed under the pressure of successive impulses in American history, how it has fared at every social level and in every section where it left a mark, and how it has passed into action. Fundamentally, this remains a study of public opinion, but I have sought to follow the movement of opinion wherever it led, relating it to political pressures, social organization, economic changes, and intellectual interests."--from the Preface, taken from back cover.

Urban Exodus

Urban Exodus
Author: Gerald Gamm
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2001-03-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674037480

Across the country, white ethnics have fled cities for suburbs. But many have stayed in their old neighborhoods. When the busing crisis erupted in Boston in the 1970s, Catholics were in the forefront of resistance. Jews, 70,000 of whom had lived in Roxbury and Dorchester in the early 1950s, were invisible during the crisis. They were silent because they departed the city more quickly and more thoroughly than Boston's Catholics. Only scattered Jews remained in Dorchester and Roxbury by the mid-1970s. In telling the story of why the Jews left and the Catholics stayed, Gerald Gamm places neighborhood institutions--churches, synagogues, community centers, schools--at its center. He challenges the long-held assumption that bankers and real estate agents were responsible for the rapid Jewish exodus. Rather, according to Gamm, basic institutional rules explain the strength of Catholic attachments to neighborhood and the weakness of Jewish attachments. Because they are rooted, territorially defined, and hierarchical, parishes have frustrated the urban exodus of Catholic families. And because their survival was predicated on their portability and autonomy, Jewish institutions exacerbated the Jewish exodus. Gamm shows that the dramatic transformation of urban neighborhoods began not in the 1950s or 1960s, but in the 1920s. Not since Anthony Lukas's Common Ground has there been a book that so brilliantly explores not just Boston's dilemma but the roots of the American urban crisis.

Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890-1920

Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890-1920
Author: Mark Schneider
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1997
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781555532963

Discusses how activists in Boston upheld their anti-slavery tradition and promoted an equal rights agenda during the years between 1890 and 1920, a period in which African-Americans throughout the country were being deprived of civil and political justice.

Irish vs. Yankees

Irish vs. Yankees
Author: James W. Sanders
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2018-02-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190681594

Boston entered the twentieth century as an Irish Catholic city, no longer the "Yankee" town of its Puritan past. The dominance of the Irish Catholic population, swelled by the "potato famine" masses, gave it political control of the city, and significantly, control of its public schools. Unlike in other American cities, Boston Catholics had little need for a large or influential parochial system: they had the School Committee, school principals, and the teachers. In Irish vs. Yankees, James W. Sanders takes a new look at this critical period in the development of Boston schools, from 1822, when Boston officially became a city, to the Second World War. Framing the discussion around the Catholic hierarchy, he considers the interplay of social forces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that led to the political rise of the Irish Catholic over the native Brahmin and the way this development shaped Boston's schools. From Bishop John Fitzpatrick to Boston College, Sanders introduces a cast of colorful characters and institutions to this tale of the education and religion in one of America's most prominent cities.

The Life of Cardinal Humberto Medeiros of Boston

The Life of Cardinal Humberto Medeiros of Boston
Author: Richard Gribble
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2021-10-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1793651027

Cardinal Humberto Medeiros served the Church as priest and bishop in Texas and Massachusetts. An immigrant from the Azores he utilized his superior intelligence, administrative ability, and language skills to move up rapidly in Church ranks. His work with the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, both nationally and internationally, especially with migrant workers, was notable. Medeiros faced a perfect storm of social, political and religious issues in Boston. The author argues that despite the challenges he faced in Boston, Medeiros was true to the Church and his personal moral code, seeking always to serve others rather than be served by them in imitation of Christ.

Catholicism and American Freedom: A History

Catholicism and American Freedom: A History
Author: John T. McGreevy
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2004-09-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0393340929

"A brilliant book, which brings historical analysis of religion in American culture to a new level of insight and importance." —New York Times Book Review Catholicism and American Freedom is a groundbreaking historical account of the tensions (and occasional alliances) between Catholic and American understandings of a healthy society and the individual person, including dramatic conflicts over issues such as slavery, public education, economic reform, the movies, contraception, and abortion. Putting scandals in the Church and the media's response in a much larger context, this stimulating history is a model of nuanced scholarship and provocative reading.

The Origins of Women's Activism

The Origins of Women's Activism
Author: Anne M. Boylan
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2003-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807861251

Tracing the deep roots of women's activism in America, Anne Boylan explores the flourishing of women's volunteer associations in the decades following the Revolution. She examines the entire spectrum of early nineteenth-century women's groups--Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish; African American and white; middle and working class--to illuminate the ways in which race, religion, and class could bring women together in pursuit of common goals or drive them apart. Boylan interweaves analyses of more than seventy organizations in New York and Boston with the stories of the women who founded and led them. In so doing, she provides a new understanding of how these groups actually worked and how women's associations, especially those with evangelical Protestant leanings, helped define the gender system of the new republic. She also demonstrates as never before how women in leadership positions combined volunteer work with their family responsibilities, how they raised and invested the money their organizations needed, and how they gained and used political influence in an era when women's citizenship rights were tightly circumscribed.

Continental Achievement

Continental Achievement
Author: Kevin Starr
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2020-08-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1642291358

In Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America , the first volume of Kevin Starr's magisterial work on American Catholics, the narrative evoked Spain, France, and Recusant England as Europeans explored, evangelized, and settled the North American continent. In Continental Achievement: Roman Catholics in the United States, the focus is on the participation of Catholics, alongside their Protestant and Jewish fellow citizens, in the Revolutionary War and the creation and development of the Republic. With the same panoramic view and cinematic style of Starr's celebrated Americans and the California Dream series, Continental Achievement documents the way in which the American Revolution allowed Roman Catholics of the English colonies of North America to earn a new and better place for themselves in the emergent Republic. John Carroll makes frequent appearances in roles of increasing importance: missionary, constitution writer for his ex-Jesuit colleagues, prefect apostolic, controversialist and defender of the faith, bishop, founder of Georgetown, Cathedral developer, archbishop and metropolitan, and negotiator with the Court of Rome. In him, the Maryland ethos regarding Roman Catholicism reached a point of penultimate fulfillment. Starr also vividly portrays other representative personalities in this formative period, including Charles Carroll, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence; his mother, Elizabeth Brooke Carroll, Sulpician John DuBois, whose escape from France in 1791 was arranged by Robespierre; convert Elizabeth Bayley Seton, founder of the first American sisterhood, the Sisters of Charity;Stephen Moylan, Muster-Master General of the Continental Army; Polish military engineer Thaddeus Kosciuszko; Colonel John Fitzgerald, an aide-de-camp to General Washington; Benedict Flaget, the first Bishop of Bardstown, Kentucky; merchant sea captain John Barry, who fought and won the last naval battle of the war; and William DuBourg, Bishop of Louisiana, who offered a Te Deum in a ceremony honoring General Andrew Jackson after his victory in the Battle of New Orleans. With his characteristic honesty and rigorous research, Kevin Starr gives his readers an enduring history of Catholics in the early years of the United States.