Arguing that Catholicism was a central integrating force among different ethnic and class groups, Paula Kane explores the role of religious identity in Boston in the early twentieth century. In Separatism and Subculture she traces the effect of changing class status on religious identity and solidarity, and she delineates the social and cultural meaning of Catholicism in a city where Yankee Protestant nativism persisted even as its hegemony was in...

"Long considered the lifeblood of urban African American neighborhoods, churches are held up as institutions dedicated to serving their surrounding communities. Omar McRoberts's work in Four Corners, however, reveals a very different picture. One of the toughest neighborhoods in Boston, Four Corners also contains twenty-nine churches, mostly storefront congregations, within its square-half-mile radius. In McRoberts's hands, this area teaches a startling...

Militant and Triumphant fills a major gap in the historical record of American Catholicism by presenting a vivid, objective portrait of Cardinal William Henry O'Connell and his significance in the church and his times. Focusing on both the triumphs and controversies of O'Connell's career, James M. O'Toole chronicles the history of the Catholic church in Boston in the first half of the twentieth century. The biography begins with a lively discussion...

"Beginning with the first colonists and continuing down to the present, the dominant narrative of New England Puritanism has maintained that piety and prosperity were enemies, that the rise of commerce delivered a mortal blow to the fervor of the founders, and that later generations of Puritans fell away from their religious heritage as they moved out across the New England landscape. This book offers a new alternative to the prevailing narrative,...