At the close of the Spanish-American War the United States found itself in possession of a colonial empire. The role played by the American Catholic Church in influencing administrative policy for the new, and predominately Catholic, dependencies is the subject of this incisive study by Frank T. Reuter. Reuter discusses the centuries-old intricate involvement of the Spanish crown and the native Roman Catholic Church in the civil, social, and charitable institutions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. He explores the attempts of United States officials to apply the traditional doctrine of separation of church and state in resolving the problems of a Church-run school system, the alleged desecration of native Catholic churches by American forces in the Philippines, the native antagonism toward the Spanish friars, and the disposition of Church property in dependencies with a deeply rooted correlation between the Catholic Church and the state. Recounting the development of the Catholic Church in America, which felt responsible for maintaining the islands’ religious structure after Spanish control was removed, Reuter sees the reaction of the Church to the war with Spain and to colonial policy in the early postwar period as voiced not by a monolithic political force, but by diverse spokesmen—in particular the unofficial voice of the Catholic press. He traces the growth of the Church in the United States from a disparate group of dioceses clinging to European backgrounds, disunited by a divided hierarchy, and attacked by the wave of the anti-Catholic, nativistic sentiments of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, to a church body unified by the problems in the colonies. Catholic opinion, although not utilized to its full political potential, achieved a common focus through the formation of the Federation of American Catholic Societies and the debate in Congress over the Philippine Government Bill. This study of American and native Catholic attitudes toward the formulation of United States policy in the insular dependencies and the attitude of the United States government toward the Catholic interests in the dependencies details the interplay of personalities and organizations: Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt; William Howard Taft, civil governor of the Philippines; James Cardinal Gibbons, moderator between Catholic factions and official spokesman of the hierarchy to the Papacy and the United States government; Archbishop Placide L. Chapelle, apostolic delegate of the Vatican to the Philippines; Archbishop John Ireland, friend of President McKinley; the Philippine Commissions; and the Taft Mission to the Vatican in 1902.

At the close of the Spanish-American War the United States found itself in possession of a colonial empire. The role played by the American Catholic Church in influencing administrative policy for the new, and predominately Catholic, dependencies is the subject of this incisive study by Frank T. Reuter. Reuter discusses the centuries-old intricate involvement of the Spanish crown and the native Roman Catholic Church in the civil, social, and charitable institutions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. He explores the attempts of United States officials to apply the traditional doctrine of separation of church and state in resolving the problems of a Church-run school system, the alleged desecration of native Catholic churches by American forces in the Philippines, the native antagonism toward the Spanish friars, and the disposition of Church property in dependencies with a deeply rooted correlation between the Catholic Church and the state. Recounting the development of the Catholic Church in America, which felt responsible for maintaining the islands’ religious structure after Spanish control was removed, Reuter sees the reaction of the Church to the war with Spain and to colonial policy in the early postwar period as voiced not by a monolithic political force, but by diverse spokesmen—in particular the unofficial voice of the Catholic press. He traces the growth of the Church in the United States from a disparate group of dioceses clinging to European backgrounds, disunited by a divided hierarchy, and attacked by the wave of the anti-Catholic, nativistic sentiments of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, to a church body unified by the problems in the colonies. Catholic opinion, although not utilized to its full political potential, achieved a common focus through the formation of the Federation of American Catholic Societies and the debate in Congress over the Philippine Government Bill. This study of American and native Catholic attitudes toward the formulation of United States policy in the insular dependencies and the attitude of the United States government toward the Catholic interests in the dependencies details the interplay of personalities and organizations: Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt; William Howard Taft, civil governor of the Philippines; James Cardinal Gibbons, moderator between Catholic factions and official spokesman of the hierarchy to the Papacy and the United States government; Archbishop Placide L. Chapelle, apostolic delegate of the Vatican to the Philippines; Archbishop John Ireland, friend of President McKinley; the Philippine Commissions; and the Taft Mission to the Vatican in 1902.

When is a war a holy crusade? And when does theology cause Christians to condemn violence? In American Crusade, Benjamin Wetzel argues that the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I shared a cultural meaning for white Protestant ministers in the United States, who considered each conflict to be a modern-day crusade. American Crusade examines the "holy war" mentality prevalent between 1860 and 1920, juxtaposing mainline Protestant support for these wars with more hesitant religious voices: Catholics, German-speaking Lutherans, and African American Methodists. The specific theologies and social locations of these more marginal denominations made their ministries highly critical of the crusading mentality. Religious understandings of the nation, both in support of and opposed to armed conflict, played a major role in such ideological contestation. Wetzel's book questions traditional periodizations and suggests that these three wars should be understood as a unit. Grappling with the views of America's religious leaders, supplemented by those of ordinary people, American Crusade provides a fresh way of understanding the three major American wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Catholics, who make up a quarter of the population of the United States, made significant contributions to American culture, politics, and society. They built powerful political machines in Chicago, Boston, and New York; led influential labor unions; created the largest private school system in the nation; and established a vast network of hospitals, orphanages, and charitable organizations. Yet in both scholarly and popular works of history, the distinctive presence and agency of Catholics as Catholics is almost entirely absent. In this book, R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings bring together American historians of race, politics, social theory, labor, and gender to address this lacuna, detailing in cogent and wide-ranging essays how Catholics negotiated gender relations, raised children, thought about war and peace, navigated the workplace and the marketplace, and imagined their place in the national myth of origins and ends. A long overdue corrective, Catholics in the American Century restores Catholicism to its rightful place in the American story.

Recovers a forgotten history of how U.S. Christian leaders, in the era of Spanish-American War, began using Christian ideas to promote an American responsibility for extending freedom around the world--by force, if necessary.

In 1899 the United States, having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades, U.S. imperialists justified their colonial empire by crafting novel racial ideologies adapted to new realities of collaboration and anticolonial resistance. In this pathbreaking, transnational study, Paul A. Kramer reveals how racial politics served U.S. empire, and how empire-building in turn transformed ideas of race and nation in both the United States and the Philippines. Kramer argues that Philippine-American colonial history was characterized by struggles over sovereignty and recognition. In the wake of a racial-exterminist war, U.S. colonialists, in dialogue with Filipino elites, divided the Philippine population into "civilized" Christians and "savage" animists and Muslims. The former were subjected to a calibrated colonialism that gradually extended them self-government as they demonstrated their "capacities." The latter were governed first by Americans, then by Christian Filipinos who had proven themselves worthy of shouldering the "white man's burden." Ultimately, however, this racial vision of imperial nation-building collided with U.S. nativist efforts to insulate the United States from its colonies, even at the cost of Philippine independence. Kramer provides an innovative account of the global transformations of race and the centrality of empire to twentieth-century U.S. and Philippine histories.

How do religion and politics interact in America? Why is it that at certain periods in American history, religious and political thought have followed a parallel course while at other times they have moved in entirely different directions? To what extent have minority perspectives challenged the majority position on the religious and political issues that impinge on each other? These are among the many important and fascinating questions examined in this book, the first thorough historical survey of the multi-layered connections between religion and politics in the United States. This unique collection presents previously unpublished essays by seventeen of America's leading historians and social scientists, including John Murrin, Harry Stout, John F. Wilson, Daniel Walker Howe, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Robert Swierenga, Martin Marty, Robert Wuthnow, and George Marsden. Together, these distinguished contributors provide comprehensive coverage of the historical interaction between religion and politics in America, from the colonial and Revolutionary periods, with intense commitments to and disagreements over religion, through the evangelical Protestant ascendency that marked the nineteenth century, to the growing pluralism and heightened antagonism between liberal and conservative factions that typify our own era.

This textbook is an interdisciplinary collection of scholarly and religious articles about Asian American Christianity. Its four sections -- contexts, sites, identity, and voices ? offer in-depth understanding of both Catholic and Protestant traditions, practices, theologies, and faith communities. It also highlights diversity and complexity across lines of gender, generation, denomination, race and ethnicity in Asian American Christianity.

In Making Catholic America, William S. Cossen shows how Catholic men and women worked to prove themselves to be model American citizens in the decades between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Far from being outsiders in American history, Catholics took command of public life in the early twentieth century, claiming leadership in the growing American nation. They produced their own version of American history and claimed the power to remake the nation in their own image, arguing that they were the country's most faithful supporters of freedom and liberty and that their church had birthed American independence. Making Catholic America offers a new interpretation of American life in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, demonstrating the surprising success of an often-embattled religious group in securing for itself a place in the national community and in profoundly altering what it meant to be an American in the modern world.

The second in a two-volume bibliography on church-state relations in U.S. history, this book contains eleven critical essays and accompanying bibliographical listings on periods or topics from the Civil War to the present day. Each essay reviews the available relevant literature, and the listings emphasize critical studies and documents published in the last quarter-century. This reference work will enable the reader to grasp the historiographic issues, become acquainted with the resources available, and move on to interpret current as well as past issues more knowledgebly and effectively.