Distinguished historian Robert Emmett Curran presents an informed and balanced study of the American Catholic Church's experience in its two most important regions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

When John Carroll became bishop of Baltimore in 1789, his diocese encompassed what was then the United States, from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi, from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. For almost a century and a half, the archbishop of Baltimore remained the virtual leader of his church in the new republic. In The Premier See, Thomas W. Spalding chronicles the growth, tensions, and politics of the archdiocese that helped shape the history of American Catholicism.

Includes the proceedings of the Society.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.