Something New Under the Sun: The Catholic Counterpoint in Early America

Abstract:This article responds to the provocation: what happens if we put minority traditions of thought and ideology—in this case, more specifically Catholics—into the narrative of early America? This article hints at the alternative to our textbooks and lectures: a strange and unexpected inclusion of early American Catholics during a kind of golden era initiated by imperial conflict in the early 1770s which ran to the 1840s. As historians revise broad histories of exclusion and marginalization in early American civil and intellectual life, it points to a Catholic counterpoint—and Catholic ascendence—one that was extant before the Revolution and extended deep into the antebellum era.