On the Margins

The State of American Catholic History

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2732068
AutoresLeslie Woodcock Tentler (autor de correspondencia)
Año1993
Volumen45
Número1
Páginas104
Fecha de publicación1993-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2713054
OpenAlexW2040124774
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas14
Referencias citadas8

AT ITS 1990 CONVENTION, IN BELATED RECOGNITION OF WHAT HAS been something of a scholarly coming-of-age, the Organization of American Historians sponsored a panel on New Directions in American Catholic History.' The papers were excellent, the attendance respectable, the general atmosphere one of lively interest. Still, at the close of the session, an obviously well-informed member of the audience paused to commiserate with one of the panelists. It's too bad, he said. You folks do interesting work. But you'll always be marginal to the profession. Is this dispiriting assessment correct? My own experience suggests that it might be. Yes, religious history is today a flourishing field for Americanists. And yes, the past twenty years have been a time of unprecedented fruitfulness for the study of American Catholicism, giving rise to a literature that is revisionist in the best and freshest sense. But at least in the case of Catholic studies, the scholarly ferment has had only a limited effect on the larger historical enterprise, even on historians whose principal interest is the industrial working class. Having done research both in labor history and the history of American Catholicism, I can attest to the gulf that separates these academic worlds. The gulf is social as well as intellectual: not only do the denizens of these separate worlds often fail to read one another's work, they do not know one another. When they meet for scholarly purposes, it is under different auspices and in notably different atmospheres

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