DescriptionThis project takes as its subject the integration of Catholicism into nineteenth-century American society, politics, and culture. Adopting a cross-regional approach, the dissertation argues that by midcentury the Church was far better integrated into the American South than the North, and had forged a powerful alliance with the Southern planter elite and the Southern-dominated Democratic Party. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Church increasingly forged an alliance with the growing Irish-American middle-class, whose influence within Democratic politics proved critical to the advancement of Catholic interests. During the Gilded Age the Church itself proved an arena of ideological conflict, as working-class radicals and Irish-American elites sought to define the Church’s relationship to power and poverty. In the 1890s, however, many working-class radicals returned to the Church and embraced Catholic conservatism. At 1900 the Irish-dominated institutional Church was a bulwark of conservatism, moral order, and “American” values against secular radicals and liberals.