Blurred Nationalities Across The North Atlantic

Long before the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of people were frequently moving between North America – specifically, the United States and British North America – and Leghorn, Genoa, Naples, Rome, Sicily, Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice, and Trieste. Predominantly traders, sailors, transient workers, Catholic priests, and seminarians, this group relied on the exchange of goods across the Atlantic to solidify transatlantic relations; during this period, stories about the New World passed between travellers through word of mouth and letter writing. Blurred Nationalities across the North Atlantic challenges the idea that national origin – for instance, Italianness – constitutes the only significant feature of a group’s identity, revealing instead the multifaceted personalities of the people involved in these exchanges.

"Long before the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds, if not thousands of people were constantly moving between the United States and British North America and Leghorn, Genoa, Naples, Rome, Sicily, Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice and Trieste. Predominantly traders, sailors, transient workers, Catholic priests and seminarians, this group relied on the exchange of goods across the Atlantic to solidify transatlantic relations; during this period, stories about the New World passed between travellers through word of mouth and letter writing. Based on a vast and in-depth examination of newly-found personal and commercial correspondence, Blurred Nationalities is a major addition to the study of transatlantic mobility and migration between North America and the Italian peninsula. Blurred Nationalities challenges the idea that the level of national origin, for instance, Italianness, comprises the most only significant feature of this group's identity, revealing the multifaceted personalities of the people involved in these exchanges."--

Long before the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of people were frequently moving between North America - specifically, the United States and British North America - and Leghorn, Genoa, Naples, Rome, Sicily, Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice, and Trieste. Predominantly traders, sailors, transient workers, Catholic priests, and seminarians, this group relied on the exchange of goods across the Atlantic to solidify transatlantic relations; during this period, stories about the New World passed between travellers through word of mouth and letter writing. Blurred Nationalities across the North Atlantic challenges the idea that national origin - for instance, Italianness - constitutes the only significant feature of a group's identity, revealing instead the multifaceted personalities of the people involved in these exchanges.

This book investigates and assesses how and to what extent the French Catholic missionaries carried out their evangelical activity amid the natives of Acadia/Nova Scotia from the mid-seventeenth century until 1755, the year of the Great Deportation of the Acadians. It provides a new understanding of the role played by the French missionaries in the most peripheral and less populated area of Canada during the colonial period. The decision to focus on this period is dictated by the need to investigate how and to which extent the French missionaries sought to carry out their activity within a contested territory which was exposed to the pressures coming out of both French and British imperial interests.

This book reconstructs the efforts that were made to establish a missionary network between the two Irish Colleges of Rome, Ireland, and the West Indies during the seventeenth century. It analyses the process which brought the Irish clergy to establish two dedicated colleges in the epicenter of early modern Catholicism and to develop a series of missionary initiatives in the English islands of the West Indies. During a period of great political change in Ireland, continental Europe and the Atlantic region, the book traces how and through which key figures and institutions this clerical channel was established, while at the same time identifying the main obstacles to its development.

For generations eastern Nova Scotia was one of the most celebrated Roman Catholic constituencies in Canada. Occupying a corner of a small province in a politically marginalized region of the country, the Diocese of Antigonish nevertheless had tremendous influence over the development of Canadian Catholicism. It produced the first Roman Catholic prime minister of Canada, supplied the nation with clergy and women- religious, and organized one of North America’s most successful social movements. Disciples of Antigonish recounts the history of this unique multi-ethnic community as it shifted from the firm ultramontanism of the nineteenth century to a more socially conscious Catholicism after the First World War. Peter Ludlow chronicles the faithful as they built a strong Catholic sub-state, dealing with economic uncertainty, generational outmigration, and labour unrest. As the home of the Antigonish Movement – a network of adult study clubs, cooperatives, and credit unions – the diocese became famous throughout the Catholic world. The influence of “mighty big and strong Antigonish,” as one national figure described the community, reached its zenith in the 1950s. Disciples of Antigonish traces the monumental changes that occurred within the region and the wider church over nearly a century and demonstrates that the Catholic faith in Canada went well beyond Sunday Mass.

A magisterial history of the centuries-long conflict between “progress” and “tradition” in the world’s largest international institution. The story of Roman Catholicism has never followed a singular path. In no time period has this been more true than over the last two centuries. Beginning with the French Revolution, extending to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, and concluding with present-day crises, John T. McGreevy chronicles the dramatic upheavals and internal divisions shaping the most multicultural, multilingual, and global institution in the world. Through powerful individual stories and sweeping birds-eye views, Catholicism provides a mesmerizing assessment of the Church’s complex role in modern history: both shaper and follower of the politics of nation states, both conservator of hierarchies and evangelizer of egalitarianism. McGreevy documents the hopes and ambitions of European missionaries building churches and schools in all corners of the world, African Catholics fighting for political (and religious) independence, Latin American Catholics attracted to a theology of liberation, and Polish and South Korean Catholics demanding democratic governments. He includes a vast cast of riveting characters, known and unknown, including the Mexican revolutionary Fr. Servando Teresa de Mier; Daniel O’Connell, hero of Irish emancipation; Sr. Josephine Bakhita, a formerly enslaved Sudanese nun; Chinese statesman Ma Xiaobang; French philosopher and reformer Jacques Maritain; German Jewish philosopher and convert, Edith Stein; John Paul II, Polish pope and opponent of communism; Gustavo Gutiérrez, Peruvian founder of liberation theology; and French American patron of modern art, Dominique de Menil. Throughout this essential volume, McGreevy details currents of reform within the Church as well as movements protective of traditional customs and beliefs. Conflicts with political leaders and a devotional revival in the nineteenth century, the experiences of decolonization after World War II and the Second Vatican Council in the twentieth century, and the trauma of clerical sexual abuse in the twenty-first all demonstrate how religion shapes our modern world. Finally, McGreevy addresses the challenges faced by Pope Francis as he struggles to unite the over one billion members of the world’s largest religious community.

Examines the interplay of the United States and Canada in terms of both international relations and in the various cultural things the peoples did in common, in complementary fashion, or in competition.