The Making of American Catholicism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Pfeifer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Regional Culture ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
American Catholic

The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience argues that regional and transnational relationships have been central to the making of American Catholicism. The book traces the development of Catholic cultures in the South, the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast and their contribution to larger patterns of Catholicism in the United States. Exploring the history of Catholic cultures in New Orleans, Iowa, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, and New York City, the book carefully explores the history of American Catholic cultures across regions and their relation to factors such as national origin, ethnicity, race, and gender. The chapters include close analysis of the historical experiences of Latinx and African American Catholics as well as European immigrant Catholics. Eschewing a national or nationalistic focus that might elide or neglect global connections or local complexity, the book offers an interpretation of the American Catholic experience that encompasses local, national, and transnational histories by emphasizing the diverse origins of Catholics in the United States, their long-standing ties to transnational communities of Catholic believers, and the role of region in shaping the contours of American Catholic religiosity. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book argues that regional American Catholic cultures and a larger American Catholicism developed as transnational Catholic laity and clergy ecclesiastically linked to and by Rome in a hierarchical, authoritarian, and communalistic “universal Church” creatively adapted their devotional and ideological practices in particular American regional contexts that emphasized notions of republicanism, religious liberty, individualistic capitalism, race, ethnicity, and gender.

American Catholics and “The Use and Abuse of Reading,” 1865–1873

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-64
Author(s):  
Erin Bartram
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Order ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Individual ◽  
American Catholic

ABSTRACTIn the wake of the Civil War, Father Isaac Hecker launched several publishing ventures to advance his dream of a Catholic America, but he and his partners soon found themselves embroiled in a debate with other American Catholics, notably his friend and fellow convert Orestes Brownson, over the “use and abuse of reading.” Although the debate was certainly part of a contemporary conversation about the compatibility of Catholicism and American culture, this essay argues that it was equally rooted in a moment of American anxiety over a shifting social order, a moment when antebellum faith in the individual was being tested by the rights claims of women and Americans of color. Tacitly accepting and internalizing historical claims of intrinsic and through-going Catholic “difference,” claims offered both by American Protestants and American Catholics like Brownson, scholars often presume that debates within American Catholicism reflect “Catholic” concerns first and foremost, qualifying their utility as sources of “American” cultural history. By examining American Catholic discussions of reading, individual liberty, social order, and gender in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay argues that Brownson's arguments against the compatibility of American and Catholic life were in fact far more representative of ascendant ideas in American culture than Hecker's hopeful visions of a Catholic American future made manifest through the power of reading. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways that American Catholicism can be a valuable and complex site for studying the broader history of religion and culture in the United States.

A Night in Old Chinatown

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-472
Author(s):  
William Gow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Drum Corps ◽  
And Gender

In 1938, the Chinese American community in Los Angeles hosted the Moon Festival in Old Chinatown as a fundraiser for Chinese victims of the Sino-Japanese War. Held against the backdrop of Bowl of Rice fundraisers across the United States, and the demolition of most of Old Chinatown by the construction of Union Station, the 1938 Moon Festival attracted tens of thousands of visitors to Old Chinatown while providing a stage for local Chinese Americans to perform self-representations of Chinatown to visitors. Focusing on Chinese American performances such as those of the Los Angeles Mei Wah Girls’ Drum Corps, this article examines the extent to which Chinese Americans utilized the festival’s performances of race and gender to challenge Orientalist ideas about the their community.

From “Gay Is Good” to “Unapologetically Gay”

Pride Parades ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine McFarland Bruce
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Political Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Code ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Gay Identities

Building on ideas introduced in the introduction, the author delves deeper into the history of Pride in Chapter One. Exploring the first Pride parades in major cities across the United States, the author examines archival newspaper reports and personal interviews with participants at these first events. In doing so, the author shows how the participants initiated the model of protest that characterizes Pride today by targeting cultural, rather than political change. With a focus on the parades of New York and Los Angeles in 1970, this chapter outlines the beginning of Pride as a moment of elation and celebration but also a significant historical moment of protest; by marching through the public streets, refusing the censor their gay identities, the participants challenged and destabilized the heteronormative cultural code. These initial marches thus acted as catalysts for more Pride celebrations, initiating the tradition of Pride.

Introduction

Being Muslim ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Sylvia Chan-Malik
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Cultural Imaginary ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

The introduction asks: How do we tell a story of Islam in the United States that foregrounds the lives and experiences of women of color throughout the 20th-21st centuries? The chapter asserts that Black American Muslim women are central to the history of Islam in the United States, and considers the lived experiences of being Muslim, as mediated by categories of race and gender. The chapter introduces the concepts of lived religion and the racial religious form to consider how Islam has existed in the U.S. cultural imaginary as both a lived experience and a racial and gendered trope. It argues U.S. Muslim women navigate Islam’s presence through a process of affective insurgency, in which they create their identities against existing cultural norms.

FROM POLITY TO EXCHANGE: THE FATE OF DEMOCRACY IN THE CHANGING FIELDS OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 867-888
Author(s):  
JOHANN N. NEEM
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Strong Response ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Early American History ◽  
Early American ◽  
Academic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Gordon Wood stoked a strong response from his fellow early American historians in 2015 when, in the pages of theWeekly Standard, he accused the Omohundro Institute of Early American History, publishers of the prestigiousWilliam and Mary Quarterly, of abandoning interest in the development of the United States. “A new generation of historians is no longer interested in how the United States came to be,” Wood argued. “That kind of narrative history of the nation, they say, is not only inherently triumphalist but has a teleological bias built into it.” Wood blamed the shift away from the nation on historians’ interest in such issues as race and gender: “The inequalities of race and gender now permeate much of academic history-writing, so much so that the general reading public that wants to learn about the whole of our nation's past has had to turn to the history books written by nonacademics who have no PhDs and are not involved in the incestuous conversations of the academic scholars.” Of theWilliam and Mary Quarterly, Wood concluded, “without some kind of historical GPS, it is in danger of losing its way.”

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

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