American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era

American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era
Author: Deirdre M. Moloney
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2003-04-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807860441

Tracing the development of social reform movements among American Catholics from 1880 to 1925, Deirdre Moloney reveals how Catholic gender ideologies, emerging middle-class values, and ethnic identities shaped the goals and activities of lay activists. Rather than simply appropriate American reform models, ethnic Catholics (particularly Irish and German Catholics) drew extensively on European traditions as they worked to establish settlement houses, promote temperance, and aid immigrants and the poor. Catholics also differed significantly from their Protestant counterparts in defining which reform efforts were appropriate for women. For example, while women played a major role in the Protestant temperance movement beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Catholic temperance remained primarily a male movement in America. Gradually, however, women began to carve out a significant role in Catholic charitable and reform efforts. The first work to highlight the wide-ranging contributions of the Catholic laity to Progressive-era reform, the book shows how lay groups competed with Protestant reformers and at times even challenged members of the Catholic hierarchy. It also explores the tension that existed between the desire to demonstrate the compatibility of Catholicism with American values and the wish to preserve the distinctiveness of Catholic life.

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.

Making Catholic America

Making Catholic America
Author: William S. Cossen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2023-08-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501771019

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.

Respectability and Reform

Respectability and Reform
Author: Tara M. McCarthy
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2018-04-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0815654367

In the late nineteenth century, an era in which women were expanding the influence outside the home, Irish American women carved out unique opportunities to serve the needs of their communities. For many women, this began with a commitment to Irish nationalism. In Respectability and Reform, McCarthy explores the contributions of a small group of Irish American women in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era who emerged as leaders, organizers, and activists. Profiles of these women suggest not only that Irish American women had a political tradition of their own but also that the diversity of the Irish American community fostered a range of priorities and approaches to activism. McCarthy focuses on three movements—the Irish nationalist movement, the labor movement, and the suffrage movement—to trace the development of women’s political roles. Highlighting familiar activists such as Fanny and Anna Parnell, as well as many lesser-known suffragists, McCarthy sheds light on the range of economic and social backgrounds found among the activists. She also shows that Irish American women’s commitment to social justice persisted from the Land War through the World War I era. In unearthing the rich and varied stories of these Irish American women, Respectablity and Reform deepens our understanding of their intersection with and contribution to the larger context of American women’s activism.

Respectably Catholic and Scientific

Respectably Catholic and Scientific
Author: Alexander Pavuk
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2021-09-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 081323431X

Respectfully Catholic and Scientific traces the unexpected manner in which several influential liberal-progressive Catholics tried to shape how evolution and birth control were framed and debated in the public square in the era between the World Wars-- and the unintended consequences of their efforts. A small but influential cadre of Catholic priests professionally trained in social sciences, Frs. John Montgomery Cooper, John A. Ryan, and John A. O’Brien, gained a hearing from mainline public intellectuals largely by engaging in dialogue on these topics using the lingua franca of the age, science, to the near exclusion of religious argumentation. The Catholics’ approach was more than just tactical. It also derived from the subtle influence of Catholic theological Modernism, with its strong enthusiasm for science, and from an inclination toward scientism inherited from the Progressive Era’s social science milieu. All three shared a fervent desire to translate the Catholic ethos, as they understood it, into the vocabulary of the modern age while circumventing anti-Catholic attitudes in the process. However, their method resulted in a series of unintended consequences whereby their arguments were not infrequently co-opted and used against both them and the institutional church they served. Alexander Pavuk considers the complex role of both liberal religious figures and scientific elites in evolution and birth control discourse, and how each contributed in unexpected ways to the reconstruction of those topics in public culture. The reconstruction saw the topics themselves shift from matters considered largely within moral frameworks into bodies of kno

America's Church

America's Church
Author: Thomas A. Tweed
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2011-08-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199783012

The National Shrine in Washington, DC has been deeply loved, blithely ignored, and passionately criticized. It has been praised as a "dazzling jewel" and dismissed as a "towering Byzantine beach ball." In this intriguing and inventive book, Thomas Tweed shows that the Shrine is also an illuminating site from which to tell the story of twentieth-century Catholicism. He organizes his narrative around six themes that characterize U.S. Catholicism, and he ties these themes to the Shrine's material culture--to images, artifacts, or devotional spaces. Thus he begins with the Basilica's foundation stone, weaving it into a discussion of "brick and mortar" Catholicism, the drive to build institutions. To highlight the Church's inclination to appeal to women, he looks at fund-raising for the Mary Memorial Altar, and he focuses on the Filipino oratory to Our Lady of Antipolo to illustrate the Church's outreach to immigrants. Throughout, he employs painstaking detective work to shine a light on the many facets of American Catholicism reflected in the shrine.

Germany and the Americas [3 volumes]

Germany and the Americas [3 volumes]
Author: Thomas Adam
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1366
Release: 2005-11-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1851096337

This comprehensive encyclopedia details the close ties between the German-speaking world and the Americas, examining the extensive Germanic cultural and political legacy in the nations of the New World and the equally substantial influence of the Americas on the Germanic nations. From the medical discoveries of Dr. Johann Siegert, surgeon general to Simon Bolivar, to the amazing explorations of the early-19th-century German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, whose South American and Caribbean travels made him one of the most celebrated men in Europe, Germany and the Americas examines both the profound Germanic cultural and political legacy throughout the Americas and the lasting influence of American culture on the German-speaking world. Ever since Baron von Steuben helped create George Washington's army, German Americans have exhibited decisive leadership not only in the military, but also in politics, the arts, and business. Germany and the Americas charts the lasting links between the Germanic world and the nations of the Americas in a comprehensive survey featuring a chronology of key events spanning 400 years of transatlantic history.

In Black and White

In Black and White
Author: Lily Hardy Hammond
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2010-02-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0820337005

“Our problem is not racial, but human and economic. . . . We hold the Negro racially responsible for conditions common to all races on his economic plane.” The writings of reformer Lily Hardy Hammond (1859-1925) are filled with such forthright criticisms of southern white attitudes toward African Americans--enough so that her stature as a southern progressive thinker would seem assured. Yet Hammond, who once stood at the intellectual center of the southern women’s social gospel movement and was in her time the South’s most prolific female writer on the “race question,” has been marginalized. This volume reprintsIn Black and White, the most important of Hammond’s ten books, along with a sampling of the dozens of articles she published. Elna C. Green’s biographical introduction tells of Hammond’s marriage to a prominent Methodist minister and educator. It also traces Hammond’s career within the context of prevailing gender and racial attitudes in the Jim Crow South. Hammond, who had roots in Methodist home mission work, was also active in such secular and ecumenical organizations as the Southern Sociological Congress, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Hammond worked alongside blacks to promote education, improve living conditions, and stop lynching. As a suffragist and temperance advocate, she urged the leaders of those largely white women’s movements to partner with African Americans. Historians of religion, social science, and race relations will welcome the reintroduction of this remarkable but virtually forgotten figure.

New Women of the Old Faith

New Women of the Old Faith
Author: Kathleen Sprows Cummings
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2009
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0807832499

"Cummings highlights four women: Chicago-based journalist Margaret Buchanan Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty, SND, founder of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., one of the first Catholic women's colleges; Philadelphia educator Sister Assisium McEvoy, SSJ; and Katherine Eleanor Conway, a Boston editor, public figure, and antisuffragist. Cummings uses each woman's story to explore how debates over Catholic identity were intertwined with the renegotiation of American gender roles. By examining female power within Catholic religious communities and organizations, she challenges the widespread assumption that women who were faithful members of a patriarchal church were incapable of pathbreaking work on behalf of women.".

A Greater Ireland

A Greater Ireland
Author: Ely M. Janis
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299301249

A Greater Ireland examines the Irish National Land League in the United States and its impact on Irish-American history. It also demonstrates the vital role that Irish-American women played in shaping Irish-American nationalism.