The Protestant Image in the Catholic Mind: Interreligious Encounters in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Restricted (Penn State Only)
Author:
Cossen, William Steven
Graduate Program:
History
Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
Document Type:
Dissertation
Date of Defense:
October 03, 2016
Committee Members:
Philip Jenkins, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor Amy S Greenberg, Committee Chair/Co-Chair Amy S Greenberg, Committee Member Daniel L Letwin, Committee Member Roger Kent Finke, Outside Member
Keywords:
American history Religious history Catholicism Gilded Age Progressive Era Nationalism Imperialism Immigration Anti-Catholicism Hegemony
Abstract:
Although scholars have analyzed Catholics as outsiders in American history, historians have devoted far less space to the related question of how Catholics perceived the Protestants with whom they shared space in the United States. “The Protestant Image in the Catholic Mind” explores the construction of Protestant identity by American Catholics during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, a period in which Catholicism became the country’s largest denomination. Catholics, particularly those associated with the U.S. church's Americanist movement, worked in the years following the Civil War to entrench their claim to belonging in the consolidating American nation. They did so by demonstrating the integral roles Catholics played in a variety of connected imperial, political, and public reform projects and by engaging in a rhetoric of anti-Protestantism against the Protestants who frequently regarded themselves as the normative Americans. Sitting at the intersection of a number of historical subfields, including intellectual, political, religious, and social history, “The Protestant Image in the Catholic Mind” will be useful for those seeking to understand not only Catholic intellectual trends but also larger questions of hegemony, identity, and nationalism in the postbellum United States.