Booknotes: American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era

New Arrival:
• American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era by Robert Emmett Curran (LSU Press, 2023).

A pair of sectional studies of Civil War-era Catholics were recently published, William Kurtz's northern-focused Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America (2015) and Gracjan Kraszewski's Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South (2020). As important and well received as those two specialized works have been, the sweep of Robert Emmett Curran's American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era is more inclusively broad.

From the description: Curran's study "of American Catholicism in the Civil War era is the first comprehensive history of Roman Catholics in the North and South before, during, and after the war." The period covered in the book is roughly from the war with Mexico through the end of Reconstruction. Curran also seeks to integrate all Catholic groups into his narrative. More: "Curran provides an in-depth look at how the momentous developments of these decades affected the entire Catholic community, including Black and indigenous Americans. He also explores the ways that Catholics contributed to the reshaping of a nation that was testing the fundamental proposition of equality set down by its founders."