Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America - The Colonial Experience | History Book on Early American Catholicism & Religious Settlements | Perfect for Students, Historians & Catholic Studies" （注：根据您提供的原始标题，这似乎是一本关于北美罗马天主教殖民历史的书籍。我按照SEO规范进行了优化：保持核心关键词，添加了相关术语，明确了书籍类型，并增加了使用场景说明。）
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Product 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 Bartolomé 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.
Customer Reviews
With Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America, Starr continues in the tradition of American Studies. Starr declares in the preface that his goal is not mere narration of Catholic history; rather, he writes because American culture cannot be understood divorced from the American Catholic experience. Starr sets as his models Perry Miller's way of placing Puritans in American history and the way Irving Howe's did the Jews. But Starr's faith pushes him further. He recognizes that Catholics in America are today living in "a time of crisis and renewal" (p. xii). Starr wants his book to be part of the renewal. "It is time for American Catholics to repossess and to learn from their North American pilgrimage" (p. xii). To these ends, Starr emphasizes the hopes that Roman Catholics invested into colonial America. Don't come to the book with your own hope of learning hither-to unknown facts that Starr has uncovered in a dusty courthouse archive. What Starr is best at is Perry Miller-like, magisterial and insightful, synthesis of published primary and secondary sources. For example, when writing of Indians and missions, Starr takes pains to show the importance of distinguishing Dominican legalism from Franciscan millennialism. In a bibliographic essay Starr then points readers to John Leddy Phelan's The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (1970) which did the work of "excavating and explicating the millennial agenda" that Starr applies to understanding the failure of Franciscan Indian relations in Florida, New Mexico, and California (p. 574). As much as Starr tells well the stories of laity and secular clergy, he is especially good with the religious. He asserts that the "clerical bohemianism" of the Recollects undermined their work in Quebec. "The Recollects," he sums up were "neither as numerous or as political connected as the Capuchins and Jesuits, nor as rich and entitled as the Sulpicians, nor as episcopally sponsored as the Paris Foreign Mission Society and secular clergy" (p. 449). Throughout the book, Starr promotes the history of early colonial educational institutions. Roman Catholics, he believes, need to own their important role in American education. To this end he especially recommends the Ursuline sisters as offering "a usable North American past" (384).
