"HISTORY...IS AN ENDEAVOR TOWARD BETTER UNDERSTANDING AND, CONSEQUENTLY, A THING IN MOVEMENT."
In September 1893, Catholic laypeople, clergy, and prelates met at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago as the Columbian Catholic Congress to discuss their church’s history and chart its course into the future. The leadership of Catholic laywomen in shaping the course of the Congress has been virtually absent in scholarship, much as it was hidden from contemporaries in the past. The act of a Catholic woman speaking among both men and women in a public space was significant, as it demonstrated an increasing assertiveness on the part of Catholic women, including those holding to a conception of gendered, separate spheres, that women had key roles to play in shaping public Catholicity and Catholics’ ideas about their own community of faith. A core group of Catholic women played a hitherto underappreciated part in bringing the Congress to life. This study therefore centers women in the history of, more narrowly, Catholicism’s place at the World’s Columbian Exposition and, more broadly, the Catholic public of the early Progressive Era, and demonstrates the often-invisible labor in which women engaged to develop their church’s intellectual life in the early Progressive Era.
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This article seeks to overcome a traditional disjuncture between labor and religious history by analyzing the role of labor schools as central points of contact between the Catholic Church and workers in the mid-twentieth century. It takes as its primary subject Hartford’s Diocesan Labor Institute, which operated from 1942 to 1967. Hartford's program is of particular historical interest due to its longevity, its extensive public reach, and its role as a model for the founding of several other labor schools. I argue that gender and class shifts - particularly the increasing entry of women into the workforce and a perceived climb up the class ladder by Catholic workers - together contributed to both the rise and decline of Catholic labor education in Connecticut and the United States.
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Scholars have written extensively on dueling and honor in the antebellum period, but most have neglected or dismissed the work of anti-dueling associations. Anti-dueling activists staked a claim to public power by challenging duelists’ claims to mastery. The history of the organizations provides evidence that the South was home to many similar societies dedicated to public activism and moral uplift. Their work illustrates the incapacity of the law, in a period of social transformation on the eve of the sectional crisis, to produce social reform without community support and the commitment of authorities to safeguard public order.
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Although scholars have analyzed the second wave of European immigration following the Civil War, they have devoted less space to examining representations of the new, European, Catholic migrants by native-born American Catholics, and while the historiography of American Catholicism has been increasingly attentive to ethnic divisions within the country’s wider Catholic community, there has been little in the way of interpretations of the actual rhetoric, imagery, and ideology at the foundation of such divisions. Catholics, especially those associated with the modernist and Americanist movements within the church in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, this article argues, frequently attached their religious community to the period’s prevailing, hegemonic discourses of whiteness and Anglo-American racial superiority. The Americanist movement, in particular, may have had a darker side than has been previously acknowledged. These ideologies have been traditionally consigned to the Protestant camp when, in fact, Catholics actually played an important role in reconstructing and redeploying against their coreligionists the very rhetoric which had been used frequently in the service of anti-Catholicism
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