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In The South’s Tolerable Alien, Andrew S. Moore probes the role of Catholics in the post–World War II South and argues persuasively that, until the 1960s, religion rivaled race as a boundary separating residents of the Bible Belt. Delving deep into underutilized diocesan archives, he explores the ways in which southern Catholics worked to be both good Catholics and good southerners in a region largely defined by Protestant denominations, and explains how the burgeoning civil rights movement ultimately breached these religious barriers.

With religious intolerance integral to southern Protestant identity, antiCatholicism persisted longer in the South than in any other part of the country. Yet despite the prejudices against them, southern Catholics refused to shrink from public view, creating a separate subculture to sustain their religious identity as they marked out public sacred space from which they could engage their critics. Moore describes in detail the Catholics’ civic displays and public rituals—including the diocese of MobileBirmingham’s annual Christ the King celebrations, which featured downtown parades of over 25,000 people. More than mere assertions of their presence, these pageants provided Catholics with opportunities to craft a secular identity within the American mainstream.

As Moore maintains, the rise of the civil rights movement slowly diminished religious tension among white southerners as violent confrontations in Selma and Birmingham forced Catholics, as well as others, to take a stand. Once the civil rights movement was in full swing, either support for or opposition to racial desegregation became paramount and contributed to social and political realignments along racial lines instead of religious ones. Comparing the responses to the struggle to end Jim Crow among dioceses, Moore finds that, among Catholics, there was no simple liberal/conservative dichotomy. Instead, he argues that, in the South, the civil rights movement was more important than the Second Vatican Council in reshaping the social and political stances of the Catholic Church. By describing the relationship between Catholics and Protestants in the South from a Catholic perspective, Moore demonstrates that, despite the persistence of antiCatholicism throughout this period, white Protestants were gradually coming to terms with the modern South's religious pluralism. With The South’s Tolerable Alien, Moore offers the first serious analysis of southern Catholicism outside of Louisiana and makes an enormous contribution to the study of southern religion. AUTHOR BIO: Andrew S. Moore is an assistant professor of history at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire..
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From a leading young intellectual and the author of For Common Things: a thoughtful and provocative look at the history and meaning of American freedom.

Freedom has always been an essential part of American identity, shaping both our personal lives and our political beliefs. Now, Jedediah Purdy traces this ideal from the American Revolution to today’s debates over national security, economic opportunity, and personal liberty. This book shows how “freedom” has inspired the country’s best and worst moments—courage and emancipation, but also fear, delusion, and pointless war.

Purdy grounds his theme in the stories of individuals: Frederick Douglass urging Americans to extend freedom to slaves; Ralph Waldo Emerson arguing for self-fulfillment as an essential part of liberty; reformers and presidents struggling to redefine citizenship in a fast-changing world. He asks essential questions: Does capitalism perfect or destroy freedom? Does freedom mean following God’s word, tradition, or one’s own heart? Can a nation of individualists also be a community of citizens? Throughout, he shows the paradox at the heart of American freedom: believing we have mastery of our own lives, we are increasingly thwarted by economic and political forces beyond our control.

A Tolerable Anarchy is a book of history that speaks plainly to our lives today, urging us to claim our tradition of freedom in all its vitality.

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This digital document is an article from Church History, published by Thomson Gale on December 1, 2007. The length of the article is 1032 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The South's Tolerable Alien: Roman Catholics in Alabama and Georgia, 1945-1970.(Book review)
Author: Michael Pasquier
Publication:Church History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 1, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 76 Issue: 4 Page: 872(3)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
Price: $9.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In "Tolerable Entertainment," Herman Melville’s life and literary work serve as windows on the tumultuous world of antebellum New York City. Charting Melville’s writings from Typee (1846) to Pierre (1852) as responses to his experience of living in the city, this book reveals the dramatic shifts in American life occurring at the time.

Perhaps more than any other nineteenth-century writer, Melville has been read and understood in the context of his career, embodied in a narrative of the trajectory from immature emergence, through brilliant ascendance, to collapse into neglect. Moving beyond these stereotypes, John Evelev uses Melville’s writings to place the concept of "career" within a historical framework, as part of the ideological project of a new middle-class professionalism. He describes a meritocratic ethos of competitive specialization and expertise that distanced itself from both the deskilling of industrialized labor and the older professional arrangement of elite patronage. By exploring the intersections of class and culture in antebellum America, Evelev offers a new perspective on Melville’s literary career.

"Tolerable Entertainment" reads Melville’s life and work in relation to such cultural developments as the famous "high/low" theater riots at Astor Place and the rise of the lyceum circuit, a forum for celebrity lecturers to reach the new urban "middlebrow" audience. The book also considers such transformations in antebellum social attitudes as urban workers’ protests against industrialization and the growth of the "self-culture" of the new urban middle class, with the emergence of vocational associations and professional specialization.

Evelev’s readings run against the grain of modern Melville scholarship by emphasizing not the values of individualism and democracy that have led critics to construe Melville’s writings as central to the American canon, but rather the ambivalent cultural and vocational distinctions of the developing middle class to which Melville belonged..
Price: $34.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This digital document is an article from The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, published by Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Assn. on November 1, 1997. The length of the article is 1591 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Tolerable Differences: Living with Deviance, 2d ed. (book reviews)
Author: Tammy L. Greer
Publication:The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology (Refereed)
Date: November 1, 1997
Publisher: Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Assn.
Volume: v34 Issue: n4 Page: p468(4)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]