“God's Representative in Our Midst”: Toward a History of the Catholic Diocesan Clergy in the United States

1998 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 326-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Woodcock Tentler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
Parish Clergy ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Diocesan Priests

From a historian's point of view, the Catholic diocesan clergy in the United States look rather like forgotten men. As a group, they have never figured prominently in the scholarly literature. American Catholic history may have had an emphatically clerical bias as late as the 1950s, but the focus then was mainly on the chancery. The parish clergy were almost as neglected as the famously docile laity. The laity have moved in recent years to the forefront of Catholic historical consciousness, and won for themselves a less docile image in the process. But priests have not enjoyed equivalent attention—indeed, in the eyes of at least some practitioners, priests are today mildly suspect as subjects of research. We do not, after all, want a return to the bad old days of “clerical” history. The predictable consequence is a major hole in our church-historical knowledge. Despite the new vitality in American Catholic historical scholarship, we know very little about the history of diocesan priests in the United States—who they were, how they lived and worked, what they thought about their ministry or the people they served.

Writing American Catholic History

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Margaret M. McGuinness ◽  
James T. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
New France ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
Eastern Seaboard

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the history of U.S. Catholicism, which is traced back to the efforts of Franciscan missionaries in the sixteenth-century Southwest prior to the arrival of Anglo-Protestants along the Eastern Seaboard, and then moved on to Jesuits in New France (Canada) early in the following century. By 1850, Catholicism was the largest religious denomination in the United States, and remains so to this day. American Protestant Christianity has always boasted a substantial aggregate majority of religious adherents, but Protestantism was broken into so many movements by the mid-nineteenth century that no single Protestant group equaled in size the nation's Catholic populace. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Education for Sovereign People

2019 ◽  
pp. 164-185
Author(s):  
Peggy Cooper Davis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Right To Education ◽  
The People ◽  
Personal Rights ◽  
History Of

In chapter 6, Peggy Cooper Davis notes that in a democratic republic, the people are sovereign and must be free and educated to exercise that sovereignty. She contends that the history of chattel slavery’s denial of human sovereignty in the United States, slavery’s overthrow in the Civil War, and the Constitution’s reconstruction to restore human sovereignty provide a basis for recognizing that the personal rights protected by the United States Constitution, as amended on the demise of slavery, include a fundamental right to education that is adequate to enable every person to participate meaningfully as one among equal and sovereign people.

The Making of the Western Defense System: France, the United States, and MC 48

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Trachtenberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Defense System ◽  
New Strategy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Strength ◽  
The Military

This chapter focuses on a document formally adopted by the NATO Council in December 1954, called MC 48, a report by the Alliance's Military Committee on “The Most Effective Pattern of NATO Military Strength for the Next Few Years.” In approving this document, the Council authorized the military authorities of the Alliance to “plan and make preparations on the assumption that atomic and thermonuclear weapons will be used in defense from the outset.” One very important consequence of the new strategy from the European point of view had to do with what was called “nuclear sharing”—that is, with the provision of American nuclear weapons to the NATO allies. This policy of nuclear sharing was one of the key elements in the history of this period.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis A. Pérez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Liberation ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
History Of

The character of the history of Cuba was fixed early in the nineteenth century, at the about moment that Cubans imagined the need for a proper history of their own. From that time forward, historical knowledge of Cuba has hewed to a well-defined narrative arc, one shaped discursively around the formation of nation, something of a chronicle of national liberation given principally to the celebration of collective resolve and commemoration of individual valor. Much of the historical literature has been given to the heroic, an account of a people to whom is ascribed indomitable will confronting adversaries possessed of unyielding determination, from which are derived two principal narrative subsets of struggle: against colonialism (Spain) and against imperialism (the United States)....

Anti-Catholicism in the United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark S. Massa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Boundary Maintenance ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Catholic

Historian John Higham once referred to anti-Catholicism as “by far the oldest, and the most powerful of anti-foreign traditions” in North American intellectual and cultural history. But Higham’s famous observation actually elided three different types of anti-Catholic nativism that have enjoyed a long and quite vibrant life in North America: a cultural distrust of Catholics, based on an understanding of North American public culture rooted in a profoundly British and Protestant ordering of human society; an intellectual distrust of Catholics, based on a set of epistemological and philosophical ideas first elucidated in the English (Lockean) and Scottish (“Common Sense Realist”) Enlightenments and the British Whig tradition of political thought; and a nativist distrust of Catholics as deviant members of American society, a perception central to the Protestant mainstream’s duty of “boundary maintenance” (to utilize Emile Durkheim’s reading of how “outsiders” help “insiders” maintain social control). An examination of the long history of anti-Catholicism in the United States can be divided into three parts: first, an overview of the types of anti-Catholic animus utilizing the typology adumbrated above; second, a narrative history of the most important anti-Catholic events in U.S. culture (e.g., Harvard’s Dudleian Lectures, the Suffolk Resolves, the burning of the Charlestown convent, Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures); and finally, a discussion of American Catholic efforts to address the animus.

A brief history of the criminalization of mental illness

CNS Spectrums ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 638-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel A. Dvoskin ◽  
James L. Knoll ◽  
Mollie Silva
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Community Mental Health ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mental Illnesses ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Serious Mental Illnesses

This article traces the history of the way in which mental disorders were viewed and treated, from before the birth of Christ to the present day. Special attention is paid to the process of deinstitutionalization in the United States and the failure to create an adequately robust community mental health system to care for the people who, in a previous era, might have experienced lifelong hospitalization. As a result, far too many people with serious mental illnesses are living in jails and prisons that are ill-suited and unprepared to meet their needs.

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