Catholic Immigrants Research Articles

Book Review: For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805–1925

Book Review: For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805–1925

British and Irish Sport: The Garrison Game and the G.A.A. in Scotland

This article reflects on the historic cultural and political cleavage between Irish Gaelic sports and the British sport of soccer. In nationalist Ireland soccer, a British innovation and largely British dominated game during the 19th and early 20th centuries, was traditionally known as ‘the garrison game’. This was due to its popularity within British garrison towns in Ireland while that country was part of the British Empire in the period up to 1922. Although still used by a few older stalwarts of the G.A.A., the description of soccer as ‘the garrison game’ has virtually passed as Gaelic sports have come to dominate in much of Ireland while soccer has become a globalised sport. The contextual setting for this paper is viewed through the sporting experience of the Irish diaspora in Scotland. Brief reference is made to Irish Catholic immigration into Scotland as well as Irish cultural resistance to British hegemony in late 19th century Ireland. The native Irish experience is compared with the differing sporting encounter of the Irish in Scotland. In Ireland, Gaelic sport eventually re-established itself throughout the country while for the Irish in Scotland, Gaelic sport struggled as soccer became the sporting avenue for social integration and national and cultural distinctiveness. Some of the reasons for this development are explained here, while this work also considers some later manifestations of antagonism between both sports and determines why the soccer-gaelic conflict has not been a significant issue in the Scottish diasporic context. This paper concludes that despite historical antagonisms between both sports, Celtic Football Club has served the Irish in Scotland in a similar way to which the G.A.A. has traditionally given shape and expression to ideas of Irishness in Ireland itself.

Fenianism in North America in the 1860s: The Problems for Church and State

Irish Catholic immigrants in North America provided, on the surface, a potentially powerful source of support for the revolutionary designs of the Fenian movement in Ireland. The Catholic bishops, encouraged by their colleagues in Ireland, especially Paul Cullen, the archbishop of Dublin, resisted Fenian strategies in the new world by declaring that the Fenian organization was condemned by the church as a secret society. The bishops' task was complicated by the circumstances of the American Civil War in that the Fenians recruited to their ranks from among the Irish enlisted soldiers. With anti‐English sentiment running high in the northern states, the Union authorities were inclined to turn a blind eye to Fenian machinations both during and after the war. Although the bishops had been anxious in 1865 to have the backing of Rome for their anti‐Fenian stance, their post‐bellum position was more cautious and they, for the most part, opposed the papal condemnation of Fenianism in 1870, a condemnation issued at the behest of the Irish bishops. The church in America and Canada laboured under various disadvantages, mostly of an anti‐Catholic nature, which hampered its ability to deal resolutely with the Irish nationalist discontent in its midst. Ultimately, however, the disintegration of the Fenian movement in North America had more to do with its own internal incoherence than any external pressure.

Book Review: How Shall We Sing in a Foreign Land?: Music of Irish Catholic Immigrants in the Antebellum United States

Book Review: How Shall We Sing in a Foreign Land?: Music of Irish Catholic Immigrants in the Antebellum United States

Religious institutions and transnationalism: A case study of catholic and evangelical Salvadoran immigrants

Modern social science theory assumed that as modernization and scien tific rationalism took hold in society religion would wither. Religion, how ever, has not only persisted, but in some respects, its importance seems to have increased. One may even argue that, throughout the world, religious groups now constitute some of the most important forms of social organiza tion and sources of worldviews (Rudolph 1997). For those who find them selves part of increasingly more encompassing global population move ments, religion provides a unique way both to make sense of their predicament and to bridge new realities with experiences in their home lands. For migrants, religious participation offers not just a way to express and interpret their individual interests and to remain connected to their origin communities; it also provides a link to churches and religious organi zations that maintain an active collective engagement by creating and shap ing transnational spaces. In fact, it has been argued that in today's post modern age, religious communities have become vital agents in the creation of transnational civil society (Rudolph 1997: 1). This paper seeks to examine religious institutions as they shape Salva doran immigrants' links to their communities of origin. It will focus on the Catholic and evangelical churches' organizational structures as they sometimes coincide?even promote?but, at other times, conflict with the immigrants' own interests to sustain ties with their homelands. A focus on the organizational and institutional structures of these religious groups provides an important angle from which to examine how these structures enable or constrain the creation of transnational spaces.1 An ethnically heterogeneous and highly bureaucratized church that operates worldwide that is confronted with a multicultural membership locally, will likely adopt strategies aimed at uniting its membership, creating new "pan" identities in

For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit 1805-1925

For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit 1805-1925

For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805-1925.

For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805-1925.

For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805-1925 by JoEllen McNergney Vinyard

322book reviews ent times and places have understood the images. It is also unfortunate that the University of California Press only reproduced small black-and-white photographs , thus ignoring the rich potential that the images have to convey information . Visual Piety joins a number of new books on "lived religions" whose authors persuasively argue that historians of religion can no longer afford to ignore the spirituality of the majority of religious people. Colleen McDannell University of Utah For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805-1925- ByJoEllen McNergney Vinyard. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1998. Pp. xviii, 310. $49.95 clothbound; $18.95 paperback.) Make it local and the story is well told. Mrs. Vinyard transforms the national story of Catholic education, told so ably by Timothy Walch (Parish School: A History ofAmerican Catholic Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present, 1995) and Harold Buetow (Of Singular Benefit: The Story of Catholic Education in the United States, 1970), into an engaging encounter with the past by focusing on the City of Detroit and its Catholic schools. While Catholics and Protestants in Detroit attempted to open schools in the first period of this story, only the rapid increase in population during the 1830's brought success. The newly developing public school movement competed with these parochial efforts. Taxes were first assessed in the 1840's. This gave rise to Bishop Peter Paul Lefevere's request for public funds for his schools in 1853. This fight differed from those in NewYork and Philadelphia since Detroit was nearly 40% Catholic and the anti-Catholicism was not as vitriolic. Rather, there were more opponents to the bishop's plans within the Catholic fold. Vinyard's book concludes with the account of the state initiatives in the 1920's to force all children to attend public schools. Catholics and Lutherans successfully countered the bigotry, particularly of the Ku Klux Klan, which threatened them. The heart of the book (chapters 3-7) is most fascinating. The author weaves a fabric of ethnic and convent threads through the parochial establishment and management of the city's Catholic schools. Vinyard indicates the differing educational philosophies of the several religious communities which dominated the Detroit educational scene; she notes the strengths and weaknesses of the diverse forms of the sisters' training. Education in Detroit remained tied to parishes, often due to ethnic forces. Parishes and their daughter establishments developed great loyalty to particular religious communities. The author's richest portrayal is of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Monroe, Michigan , who held a near monopoly of education in Detroit in the 1800's. BOOK REVIEWS323 Vinyard regularly relates the Detroit scene to parallel events in the nation, seeing both similarity and contrast. One major difference was how strongly the ethnic plurality of Detroit resisted national forces for the centralization of Catholic education in local dioceses. In Detroit the parish remained the locus of the school. One ethnic group which is well represented in this work is the large Polish community,which, due to its own inner divisions, relied on two religious communities, the Felicians and the German School Sisters of St. Francis. Vinyard 's central account ends with the beginning of Catholic high schools. Mrs. Vinyard paints a detailed and attractive picture of a community's struggle to educate its youth, depicts the disparate forces at work in that community which allowed for a colorful diversity in the overall unity of the piece, provides national scenery for background, and induces pride for all who had a hand in producing the current educational landscape. Note only that the text should read "John Lancaster Spalding" on page 93EarlBoyea Sacred HeartMajor Seminary Detroit, Michigan Sharing the Bread in Service: Sisters ofthe Blessed Sacrament, 1891-1991¦ By Patricia Lynch, S.B.S. (Bensalem, Pennsylvania [19020-8502] : Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. 1998. Pp. viii,742.) Quite fortuitously, I happened to be doing some research at the Vatican Archives in the November week that Katharine Drexel (1858-1955) was beatified in 1988, and I found myself seated eight rows from the altar at St. Peter's Basilica for the ceremony. Even more amazingly, the pensione where...

Reservation under Pressure: Ritual in the Prayer Book Crisis, 1927–1928

The Prayer Book controversy of 1927-8 was not merely ‘the echo of dead themes’, as was alleged by A. J. P. Taylor. Disputes between Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, which lay at the root of the crisis, were still at a height in the 1920s and 1930s. Anglo-Catholic confidence was shown in their vast Congresses, commencing in 1920 (and lasting until the 1960s), and in the celebrations and publications which marked the centenary of the Oxford Movement in 1933. Such confidence naturally caused Evangelicals and Broad Churchmen to look to their defences. Moreover, while in England anti-Romanism was less marked than before 1914, in Scotland it reached a high (if belated) peak in the 1920s in reaction to Irish Catholic immigration.

Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images by David Morgan

book reviews321 Nevertheless, Vecsey's volume is a most worthwhUe, provocative, and challenging effort that attempts to tie present to past in the context of reUgious ritual and belief. His summations of Sonoran Catholicism, problems of authority among the Pueblos, secularization in California, and the recent controversy over FatherJunípero Serra underscore the importance of knowing an unbiased version of both human and ecclesiastical history. Far more a treatise on missiology than an historical overview of America's missions, On the Padres' Trail proves the continuing need for a document-based, contextuaUzed history of contact and conversion of America's native peoples. Charles W Polzer, SJ. Arizona State Museum Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images. By David Morgan. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997. Pp. xviii, 265. $35.00.) David Morgan, an art historian at Valparaiso University, is concerned with how the most predictable of mass-produced reUgious imagery may be invested with "vital meanings" in the lives of those who find the art useful (p. xv). In pursuit of this, he has composed a short but densely written book on popular Christian art in the United States. Visual Piety considers both Protestant and CathoUc imagery. Its subjects range from the aesthetic piety of Jonathan Edwards to the contemporary placement of reUgious prints in the home. It attempts to provide a history of popular Christian images, a survey of domestic religious practices, and a discussion of visual theory. In order to get a better sense of why people use pious art, Morgan placed advertisements in Protestant and Catholic magazines asking readers to send him their views on Warner SaUman 's "The Head of Christ." Their responses are analyzed throughout the text to show how people make and maintain their worlds through interaction with religious images. Using SaUman's art as a starting point, Morgan discusses other topics such as the mascuUne portrayal of Christ in Sunday School art, the "hidden " meaning in art, the role of art to stimulate memory. WhUe Morgan deals with the realm of the popular, his book would be a difficult read for those who are not already schooled in art theory and cultural history . The book ranges widely through phUosophical and sociological texts, and Morgan does not spare us the names of the many people he read before writing the book. VisualPiety is a history of ideas painted quickly and in broad strokes. It rarely considers the influence of technology, politics, or even denominational theology upon the production and use of reUgious images. Other than quoting from the letters sent to him about the "Head of Christ," Morgan does not include the voices of other Christians. He prefers to give us theoretical discussions about the images in holy cards, for example, rather than do the difficult historical and sociological work of finding examples of how Catholics at differ- 322book reviews ent times and places have understood the images. It is also unfortunate that the University of California Press only reproduced small black-and-white photographs , thus ignoring the rich potential that the images have to convey information . Visual Piety joins a number of new books on "lived reügions" whose authors persuasively argue that historians of reUgion can no longer afford to ignore the spirituaUty of the majority of religious people. Colleen McDannell University of Utah For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805-1925- ByJoEUen McNergney Vinyard. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1998. Pp. xviii, 310. $49.95 clothbound; $18.95 paperback.) Make it local and the story is weU told. Mrs. Vinyard transforms the national story of CathoUc education, told so ably by Timothy Walch (Parish School: A History ofAmerican Catholic Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present, 1995) and Harold Buetow (Of Singular Benefit: The Story of Catholic Education in the United States, 1970), into an engaging encounter with the past by focusing on the City of Detroit and its CathoUc schools. While CathoUcs and Protestants in Detroit attempted to open schools in the first period of this story, only the rapid increase in population during the 1830's brought success. The newly developing public school movement competed with these parochial efforts. Taxes...

The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917 by Jon Gjerde

BOOK reviews113 by James A. Sandos (p. 222), which uses this broader context to transcend the older dichotomy between pro-mission and anti-mission interpretations. Michael Charles Neri Saint Patrick's Seminary Menlo Park, California The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917. By Jon Gjerde. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1997. Pp. xiii,426. $39.95.) The Minds ofthe West is a challenging work by a writer conversant with the latest trends in immigration history. His greatest contribution in this work, however , is the emphasis he places on two neglected areas ofAmerican history. Historians of immigration or ethnic history have been little attracted to the foreign-born who peopled rural America. Professor Gjerde's world is the rural Middle West. In his introduction he observes that by 1880 over half of the farmers in the tier of states stretching from Wisconsin to the Dakotas were foreignborn . He has depicted to a greater degree than anyone, perhaps, the tensions and problems of adjustment of the ethnic farming communities scattered in checkerboard fashion over the Upper Middle West. Likewise historians of the West (with the notable exception of Ferenc Szasz) have shown little interest in religion. Professor Gjerde has also demonstrated the centrality ofreligion in the development of these communities in a "heavily churched landscape." A Catholic weekly of Dubuque, Die Iowa, is perhaps his most frequently cited source. In Part One, "The Region," the author explains the attraction of a frontier stretching from Illinois to the Dakotas, where immigrants had the freedom to recreate the peasant villages they had left behind. These efforts aroused the alarm of such venerable nativists as Lyman Beecher and Samuel F. B. Morse, and later Josiah Strong, as well as the apprehension of the "Yankee" pioneers who settled next to them. Part One also focuses on the immigrants' need to adjust to American freedoms and American pluralism. Part Two, "The Community," demonstrates how chain migrations created the network of kinship communities that constituted the demographic base of the region described. Part Three, "The Family," compares the inner dynamics of the immigrant patriarchal family with those of the neighboring "Yankee" family. It also reveals the mtrafamilial stress that resulted from a need to adjust to an emerging national and capitalist economy. Part Four, "The Society," describes the impact of secular values and liberal politics on the ethnic communities of the Middle West at the end of the nineteenth century. The author shows how such issues as the public school, prohibition, and woman suffrage served to intensify ethnic identities. In the struggle, he also reveals, Catholic immigrants brought German Catholic corporatist ideology to their defense. 114BOOK REVIEWS The author makes a strong case against the assimilationist assumptions of such historians as Oscar Handlin. He emphasizes the persistence of immigrant traditions and social patterns that even World War I did not entirely eradicate. For Professor Gjerde, however, Norwegian Lutherans and German Catholics are paradigmatic of the ethnocultural configuration of the Upper Middle West. He paints a landscape of almost unrelieved stolidity, industry, and seriousness of purpose. Neglected are the Irish, and even more the Czech, Polish, and FrenchCanadian populations of the prairies and plains, often consigned by historians exclusively to the eastern proletariat. He has, nevertheless, produced a work that is rich in original insights. Thomas W Spalding, CEX. Spalding University Louisville, Kentucky Father PeterJohn DeSmet:Jesuit in the West. By Robert C. Carriker. [The Oklahoma Western Biographies, Volume 9·] (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1995. Pp. xx, 266. $24.95.) Published as Volume 9 for inclusion within what seems a mistitled series known as "The Oklahoma Western Biographies," this book is described (p. xiii) by the series editor to be an "exceptionally thorough and detailed biography of Father Peter John De Smet" (the well-known pioneer and ubiquitous Jesuit priest of the nineteenth-century American frontier). Although I found the book to be neither thorough nor detailed, I do recommend it on other grounds. Namely, since historical documents are quoted without attribution, it will appeal to the many college students and casual readers who do not read footnotes or endnotes. Lacking this scholarly format, Carriker's work will cast...

Civil War Boston: Home Front and Battlefield.

An examination of the role that Boston and its inhabitants played in the Civil War which focuses on business men, Irish Catholic immigrants, African Americans, and women in the antebellum period.

The poor belong to us: Catholic charities and American welfare

Between the Civil War and World War II, Catholic charities evolved from volunteer and local origins into a centralized and professionally trained workforce that played a prominent role in the development of American welfare. Dorothy Brown and Elizabeth McKeown document the extraordinary efforts of Catholic volunteers to care for Catholic families and resist Protestant and state intrusions at the local level, and they show how these initiatives provided the foundation for the development of the largest private system of social provision in the United States. It is a story tightly interwoven with local, national, and religious politics that began with the steady influx of poor Catholic immigrants into urban centres. Supported by lay organizations and by sympathetic supporters in city and state politics, religious women operated foundling homes, orphanages, protectories, reformatories, and foster care programmes for the children of the Catholic poor in New York City and in urban centres around the country. When pressure from reform campaigns challenged Catholic child care practices in the first decades of the 20th century, Catholic charities underwent a significant transformation, coming under central diocesan control and growing increasingly reliant on the services of professional social workers. And as the Depression brought nationwide poverty and an overwhelming need for public solutions, Catholic charities faced a staggering challenge to their traditional claim to stewardship of the poor. In their account, Brown and McKeown add an important dimension to our understanding of the transition from private to state social welfare.

Religious Identification in Transnational Contexts: Being and Becoming Muslim in Ethiopia and Canada

The Harari are a recently formed diaspora of Muslim elites from the walled city of Harar in eastern Ethiopia. Ethiopians as a whole have not had a history of migration—of moving abroad permanently or changing their citizenship (Catholic Immigration Centre 1). The Harari have been particularly localized and were described as late as the mid-1960s as a “one city culture” (Waldron, “Social” 6) because the overwhelming majority of their numbers resided inside the old city wall. Today, only about one-third of the total population lives in the old city, the majority of them elder inhabitants. The largest concentration of Hararis outside Ethiopia is now in Toronto, Ontario: nearly 10% of the entire population lives in this diverse Canadian city. In this paper, I draw upon comparative ethnographic fieldwork with Hararis in Harar and Toronto to explore the ways in which this move from Ethiopia, as asylum seekers or as immigrants to Canada, has affected individual and group identities. Against the backdrop of Ethiopia’s new multiethnic government, Canadian multiculturalism policies, and the refugee and immigrant journeys between the two countries, Hararis and members of more than the seventy other officially recognized qabila, or nationalities, in Ethiopia are struggling to redefine themselves both at home and abroad.

The Life and Times of Bishop Louis-Amadeus Rappe by John F. Lyons

The Life and Times of Bishop Louis-Amadeus Rappe. By John E Lyons. (The Au thor, 3175 West 165th Street, Cleveland, Ohio 44111. 1997. Pp. xii, 285. $29.95.) The Reverend John E Lyons has published this life and times biography of Louis-Amadeus Rappe, first bishop of Cleveland (1847-1870), appropriately enough during the celebration of the bicentennial of the founding of the city of Cleveland in 1796 and the sesquicentennial of the establishment of the Diocese of Cleveland in 1847. The histories of both are closely intertwined. European immigrant Catholics flocking to the jobs available in such rapidly industrializing cities as Toledo and Cleveland simultaneously fueled the explosive growth of the region and the Catholic Church itself. Recruited by Bishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, Father Rappe journeyed from France in 1840 to become a successful missionary on the northwest Ohio frontier, preaching both religion and temperance. With grave misgivings, Rappe accepted Purcell's offer to become the bishop of the new Cleveland diocese, serving until he resigned in 1870, beset by charges of mismanagement and sexual misconduct. He then went to Vermont, where he was again what he always wished to be, a missionary and temperance advocate, until his death in 1877. Lyons dedicates his study to the late Reverend William A. Jurgens, H.E.D., whose extensive research and writing form a major part of the volume. Lyons relies almost exclusively on diocesan archives in Cleveland, Baltimore, Norwood (Cincinnati), and Burlington (Vermont) and on archival material at the University of Notre Dame and at the Propaganda Fide in Rome. There are fewer than a dozen references to the secondary literature, little of it current and much of it cited improperly. Since there is no bibliography (or index, for that matter), the interested reader will have difficulty locating a particular secondary source. Either ignoring or unaware of the significant scholarship on both the Rappe administration in particular and the American Catholic Church as a whole, Lyons fails to place the events and personalities about whom he feels so deeply in any effective historical or analytical context. He has thus written not an evenhanded life and times biography of Rappe but, rather, a legal brief in which he pictures the bishop as a saintly man destroyed by lying, evil-minded enemies, both lay and cleric. For Lyons, disagreements over such issues as nationality parishes, placement of priests, or the language to be used in services and taught in parochial schools are not legitimate differences of opinion over important issues but selfish, imagined grievances which produced conspiracies, led by plotters (at first Germans but later and especially the Irish led by Father Eugene M. …

How Shall We Sing in a Foreign Land? Music of Irish Catholic Immigrants in Antebellum United States

How Shall We Sing in a Foreign Land? Music of Irish Catholic Immigrants in Antebellum United States

Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes.

This prize-winning book tells the story of American women's devotion to St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes, one of the most popular saints in the American Catholic pantheon. Robert Orsi examines St. Jude's rise from obscurity to national popularity; beginning in Chicago in 1929, and he shows how the daughters and granddaughters of Catholic immigrants called on the saint to help them make lives for themselves in the tumultuous years of depression, war, and changing workplaces and family lives.

How shall we sing in a foreign land?: music of Irish Catholic immigrants in the antebellum United States

How shall we sing in a foreign land?: music of Irish Catholic immigrants in the antebellum United States

Religion and Politics in the Early Republic: Jasper Adams and the Church-State Debate ed. by Daniel L. Dreisbach

Religion and Politics in the Early Republic: Jasper Adams and the ChurchState Debate. Edited by Daniel L. Dreisbach. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. 1996. Pp. xix, 220. $42.95 clothbound; $16.95 paperback.) Daniel Dreisbach teaches in the Department of Justice, Law, and Society at the American University,Washington, D.C. He offers here a well-edited, interesting, and useful collection of documents from the early part of the nineteenth century discussing the relation of religion and politics. For his purpose, Dreisbach focuses on a sermon by the Reverend Jasper Adams, The Relation of Christianity to Civil Government in the United States (1833), with its extensive notes, responses from Chief Justice John Marshall,Justice Joseph Story, and President James Madison, and a long, critical review, of uncertain authorship, entitled Immunity of Religion. He offers some historical comments and perspective of his own on a debate which is with us still. Adams, related to the Adamses of Massachusetts and a Congregationalist turned an Episcopal priest, was a professor, moral philosopher, and president of Charleston College. He preached his sermon during a period of freedom's ferment with the emergence of Jacksonian democracy, the disestablishment of religion in Massachusetts in 1833, an attempt to establish a Christian party in politics, and a controversy over the delivery of mail on Sunday. Living in South Carolina, Adams had to deal with the controversy over Thomas Cooper, president of South Carolina College, regarding the latter's vocal criticisms of orthodox Christians.According to Adams, these were uncertain times for religion and the Republic. In his sermon he acknowledged that the writers of the Constitution of the United States intended to reject the Constantinian establishments of the Old World. But the issue was larger than the relationship between the churches and the various states of the union and the federal government. Adams claimed that Americans did not intend to disestablish Christianity as the religion of the nation. He found evidence of this in the practices of the people, in the common law, and in the Constitution itself. Although largely silent on religion, the Constitution did acknowledge that it had been written in the year of our Lord, 1787 and contained an explicit recognition of the sanctity of Sunday. Christian faith and life was essential for the nation's good health. He argued that American civil, legal, and political institutions should provide for a nonpreferential support of the various forms of Christianity and toleration for all other religions. He buttressed his arguments with lengthy footnotes. Unfortunately, Adams is short on suggestions on what should be done with popular, noisy denominations and cults unlike, for example, the Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, the difficulty of administrating (as in Massachusetts) nonpreferential support of multiplying religious communities (together with more and more Catholic immigrants), a coalition of Christians who claimed that it knew what was the Christian thing to do for the nation's good, and radicals like Cooper who were sowing seeds of doubt about Christianity itself. Moreover, Adams does not give much attention to the case of a Jewish merchant who went to the synagogue on Saturday, but wanted to do business on Sunday. …

Love across the color line: the letters of Alice Hanley to Channing Lewis

This book examines a remarkable collection of twenty-seven letters written by a white working-class woman to her African American lover in 1907 and 1908. Stuffed inside a black lace stocking, the letters were hidden under the floorboards of a house in Northampton, Massachusetts, until their recent discovery. Reflecting the passions and anxieties of the moment, the letters were written by Alice Hanley, the daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants, to Channing Lewis, a cook in Springfield. Since the thoughts and feelings of women like Hanley have usually been filtered through middle-class reformers, her words provide a rare window into a realm of American social life seldom explored by historians. The letters are accompanied by essays that skillfully probe their larger meanings. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz introduces the letters, placing them in the context of their time, while journalist Phoebe Rolin Mitchell recounts the story of their discovery. Kathy Peiss explores Hanley's life, her negotiation of illicit love, and her desire for respectability, re-creating a dense and textured world of home, church, and town. Historian Louis Wilson unearths the trail left by Lewis and members of his extended family in Springfield. Reviewing the experiences of African Americans in that city, Wilson clarifies the economic, social, and political position of a black, middle-aged breadwinner during the difficult years of the early twentieth century.