Brokers of Culture Italian Jesuits in the American West, 1848-1919 [Hardcover]

Brokers of Cultureexamines the interactions among multiple ethnic groups in the American West and a group of nearly four hundred Italian Jesuits who emigrated to the United States after 1848 in the wake of the Italian unification movement. The first wave of exiles taught in Jesuit colleges on the East Coast, where they played a major role in reforming American seminary education. From their eastern base, the dispersed clerics moved to the frontier, shaping the evolution of culture in eleven western states. The Jesuits' most powerful source of influence was their western colleges, which adhered to educational traditions brought from Europe while simultaneously meeting the needs of an ethnically mixed and mobile frontier population.Brokers of Cultureanalyzes how Italian Jesuit missionary?migr?sattempted to integrate a heterogeneous western population (Native Americans, Hispanics, European immigrants, and native-born Americans) into a global religious community while simultaneously facilitating those groups' entry into American society. This is an essential book for Pacific Northwest historians. A major study that will shape the next generation of scholarship in Western and religious history. This is a fascinating study about the work of Italian Jesuits in the western part of the United States in the seventy or so years following the European revolutions of 1848 McKevitt proves himself an exceptional scholar by concretizing the threefold task of the historian in finding the sources, evaluating the sources, and writing his own history in this, his latest work. This work has been widely researched in American and European archives. It is clearly organized and well written, and it will be read with profit by historians of culture, of immigration, of American Catholicism, of Native Americans, and of the American West. McKevitt's is an exemplary work of historical scholarship a wonderful example of mature American Catholic historical scholarship.l“(