Catholicism in 20th Century America
A joint venture between the Cushwa Center and Cornell University Press, the Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in 20th Century America series features books by senior and junior scholars that explore the ways in which Catholics and their church have responded to, shaped, and been influenced by developments in American society, culture, politics, and religion throughout the 20th century. The series editor is R. Scott Appleby.
Pursuing Truth: How Gender Shaped Catholic Education at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland (2021)
by Mary J. Oates, C.S.J.
In Pursuing Truth, Mary J. Oates explores the roles that religious women played in teaching generations of college and university students amid slow societal change that brought the grudging acceptance of Catholics in public life. Across the 20th century, Catholic women's colleges modeled themselves on, and sometimes positioned themselves against, elite secular colleges. Oates describes these critical pedagogical practices by focusing on Notre Dame of Maryland University, formerly known as the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, the first Catholic college in the United States to award female students four-year degrees. The pattern of institutional development regarding the place of religious identity, gender and sexuality, and race that Oates finds at Notre Dame of Maryland is a paradigmatic story of change in U.S. higher education. Similarly representative is her account of the school's effort, from the late 1960s to the present, to maintain its identity as a women's liberal arts college.
All Good Books Are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America (2013)
by Una M. Cadegan
In All Good Books Are Catholic Books, Una M. Cadegan shows how the Church’s official position on literary culture developed over the crucial period from World War I to the close of Vatican II, and how Catholics developed a rationale by which they could both respect the laws of the Church as it sought to protect the integrity of doctrine and also engage the culture of artistic and commercial freedom in which they operated as Americans. Catholic literary figures including Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Merton are important to Cadegan’s argument, particularly as their careers and the reception of their work demonstrate shifts in the relationship between Catholicism and literary culture. Cadegan trains her attention on American critics, editors, and university professors and administrators who mediated the relationship among the Church, parishioners, and the culture at large.
Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History (2012)
Contributors: 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; Thomas Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania
On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York (2009)
by James T. Fisher
Site of the world's busiest and most lucrative harbor throughout the first half of the 20th century, the Port of New York was also the historic preserve of Irish American gangsters, politicians, longshoremen's union leaders, and powerful Roman Catholic pastors. This is the demimonde depicted to stunning effect in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) and into which James T. Fisher takes readers in this remarkable and engaging historical account of the classic film's backstory.
Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in St. Paul (2001)
by Mary Lethert Wingerd
Are Minneapolis and St. Paul "Twin Cities" in proximity only? How can two cities, spoken of so often in one breath, differ so greatly in their histories and characteristics? Claiming the City traces the contours of St. Paul's "civic identity" to show how personal identities and political structures of power are fundamentally informed by the social geography of place. St. Paul proves a particularly fruitful site for such analysis because it has developed along a divergent path from that of Minneapolis, its sister city just across the Mississippi river.