The Cushwa Center is pleased to announce the publication of Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History, edited by R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings (Cornell University Press, 2012). This is the latest volume in a series, Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America, and it addresses the distinctive presence and agency of Catholics as Catholics, a narrative that is almost entirely absent in scholarly and popular works of history.
In this book, the editors (a former and current director of the Cushwa Center, respectively) bring together historians of American politics, race, social theory, labor, and gender who detail in cogent and wide-ranging essays how Catholics in the 20th century thought about war and peace, negotiated gender relations, raised children, navigated the workplace and the marketplace, and imagined their place in the national myth of origins and ends. A long overdue corrective, Catholics in the American Century restores Catholicism to its rightful place in the American story.
Contributors include R. Scott Appleby, University of Notre Dame; Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University; Kathleen Sprows Cummings, University of Notre Dame; R. Marie Griffith, Washington University in St. Louis; David G. Gutiérrez, University of California, San Diego; Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; John T. McGreevy, University of Notre Dame; Robert Orsi, Northwestern University; and Thomas Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania.