Annotation Founded in Baltimore in 1828, the Oblate Sisters of Providence formed the first permanent African-American Roman Catholic sisterhood in the United States. Exploring the antebellum history of this pioneering sisterhood, Batts Morrow demonstrates the centrality of race in the Oblate experience.

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.

Diasporic Africa presents the most recent research on the history and experiences of people of African descent outside of the African continent. By incorporating Europe and North Africa as well as North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this reader shifts the discourse on the African diaspora away from its focus solely on the Americas, underscoring the fact that much of the movement of people of African descent took place in Old World contexts. This broader view allows for a more comprehensive approach to the study of the African diaspora. The volume provides an overview of African diaspora studies and features as a major concern a rigorous interrogation of "identity." Other primary themes include contributions to western civilization, from religion, music, and sports to agricultural production and medicine, as well as the way in which our understanding of the African diaspora fits into larger studies of transnational phenomena.

Within ecclesiastical circles, both from the perspective of legal practice and ordinary relational matters between ecclesiastical entities, the theme of contract very scarcely occupies a place of prominence. It is a situation that is due on the one hand, and to a large extent, to the fact that the canonisation of civil law on contracts (c. 1290 CIC/1983) has had the consequence of transferring the preoccupation of the entities on this matter to the domain of civil law. Besides, and still connected to the above, is the tendency to attribute a merely pastoral relevance to their relationships, with little or no reference to the juridic aspects inherent in these relationships. It is a situation that is largely responsible for the crisis which do not uncommonly characterise some of these relationships as verified over the centuries; particularly in the relationship between dioceses and religious institutes. The issuance of various papal and conciliar exhortations before and after Vatican II, as well as the normative instructions and legal provisions contained in various juridic documents, most prominently cc. 271, 520, 681 and 790 of CIC/1983, has gone a long way to dissipate some of the tensions of the past. However, the true nature of how the contractual relationship between ecclesiastical entities, including the attendant issues of conceptual understanding, civil status of ecclesiastical entities, resolution of contractual disputes, etc., remains a matter of investigative interest for the canonist. This is, in a nutshell, the substance of this research work. The conclusions arrived at offer the reader an insight into the available untapped resources within the ecclesiastical legal system, as well as some considerable possibilities which remain to be explored to the benefit of the subjects of canon law.