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Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America: The Colonial Experience
Contributor(s): Starr, Kevin (Author)
ISBN: 162164118X     ISBN-13: 9781621641186
Publisher: Ignatius Press
OUR PRICE:   $31.46  
Product Type: Hardcover
Published: November 2016
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- History | North American
- Religion | Christianity - History
- Religion | Christianity - Catholic
Dewey: 970
LCCN: 2016933905
Physical Information: 2" H x 7.1" W x 10.1" (3.05 lbs) 675 pages
Themes:
- Religious Orientation - Christian
- Religious Orientation - Catholic
- Chronological Period - 16th Century
- Chronological Period - 17th Century
- Chronological Period - 18th Century
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

Kevin Starr has achieved a fast-paced evocation of three Roman Catholic civilizations--Spain, France, and Recusant England--as they explored, evangelized, and settled the North American continent. This book represents the first time this story has been told in one volume. Showing the same narrative verve of Starr's award-winning Americans and the California Dream series, this riveting--but sometimes painful--history should reach a wide readership.

Starr begins this work with the exploration and temporary settlement of North America by recently Christianized Scandinavians. He continues with the destruction of Caribbean peoples by New Spain, the struggle against this tragedy by the great Dominican Bartolom de Las Casas, the Jesuit and Franciscan exploration and settlement of the Spanish Borderlands (Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Baja, and Alta California), and the strengths and weaknesses of the mission system.

He then turns his attention to New France with its highly developed Catholic and Counter-Reformational cultures of Quebec and Montreal, its encounters with Native American peoples, and its advance southward to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The volume ends with the founding of Maryland as a proprietary colony for Roman Catholic Recusants and Anglicans alike, the rise of Philadelphia and southern Pennsylvania as centers of Catholic life, the Suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, and the return of John Carroll to Maryland the following year.

Starr dramatizes the representative personalities and events that illustrate the triumphs and the tragedies, the achievements and the failures, of each of these societies in their explorations, treatment of Native Americans, and translations of religious and social value to new and challenging environments. His history is notable for its honesty and its synoptic success in comparing and contrasting three disparate civilizations, albeit each of them Catholic, with three similar and differing approaches to expansion in the New World.


Contributor Bio(s): Starr, Kevin: -

Kevin Starr holds a BA from the University of San Francisco, an MA and PhD from Harvard University, and a Master of Library Science from UC Berkeley. He has served as both the City Librarian of San Francisco and the State Librarian for California. He is currently a Professor History at the University of Southern California, where he is a director of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies. Starr's many articles and books, including his Americans and the California Dream series, have earned him multiple fellowships, awards, and honorary degrees.