In 1905 Rev. Francis Clement Kelley founded the Catholic Church Extension Society of the United States of America. Drawing attention to the common link of religion, Kelley proclaimed the Extension Society’s duty to be that of preventing American Protestant missionaries, public school teachers, and others from separating people from their natural faith, Catholicism. Though domestic evangelization was its founding purpose, the Extension Society eventually expanded beyond the national border into Mexico in an attempt to solidify a hemispheric Catholic identity. Exploring international, racial, and religious implications, Anne M. Martínez’s Catholic Borderlands examines Kelley’s life and actions, including events at the beginning of the twentieth century that prompted four exiled Mexican archbishops to seek refuge with the Archdiocese of Chicago and befriend Kelley. This relationship inspired Kelley to solidify a commitment to expanding Catholicism in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in response to the national plan of Protestantization, which was indiscreetly being labeled as “Americanization.” Kelley’s cause intensified as the violence of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion reverberated across national borders. Kelley’s work with the U.S. Catholic Church to intervene in Mexico helped transfer cultural ownership of Mexico from Spain to the United States, thus signaling that Catholics were considered not foreigners but heirs to the land of their Catholic forefathers.

Commissioned by the diocese to commemorate its centenary, this is the first book-length study of the history of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Des Moines, Iowa. Formally established in 1911, the Diocese of Des Moines built on the foundations laid by earlier generations of missionaries, religious women, priests, and bishops to provide a gathering point for the scattered Catholic population of southwest Iowa. This book weaves together the various stories of religious and lay members in the forging of a visible religious presence in the region. Influential priests of the diocese included Monsignor Luigi Ligutti, who became a renowned advocate of rural life, and Bishop Maurice Dingman, who took on sometimes controversial social and political issues. In October 1979, the diocese hosted Pope John Paul II for a short but memorable visit, which was the largest religious gathering in Iowa’s history.

A study of the career of the KKK and its appeal in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas in the early twentieth century. This is a study of a disturbing phenomenon in American society—the Ku Klux Klan—and that eruption of nativism, racism, and moral authoritarianism during the 1920s in the four states of the Southwest—Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas—in which the Klan became especially powerful. The hooded order is viewed here as a move by frustrated Americans, through anonymous acts of terror and violence, and later through politics), to halt a changing social order and restore familiar orthodox traditions of morality. Entering the Southwest during the post-World War I period of discontent and disillusion, the Klan spread rapidly over the region and by 1922 its tens of thousands of members had made it a potent force in politics. Charles C. Alexander finds that the Klan in the Southwest, however, functioned more as vigilantes in meting extra-legal punishment to those it deemed moral offenders than as advocates of race and religious prejudice. But the vigilante hysteria vanished almost as suddenly as it had appeared; opposition to its terrorist excesses and its secret politics led to its decline after 1924, when the Klan failed abysmally in most of its political efforts. Especially significant here are the analysis of attitudes which led to this revival of the Klan and the close examination of its internal machinations. “The Ku Klux Klan is not a single phenomenon. It is three different organizations, which sprang up three different times, for three different reasons. Charles Alexander focuses this study—and it’s a good one—on the middle Klan, the so-called Invisible Empire extending from 1915 to 1944, flourishing in the mid-twenties with a membership estimated at 5 million, at one time or another dominating to some degree politically every city in the Southwest. . . . A forthright and definitive account, to be read along with David Chalmers’s recent Hooded Americanism . . . for the complete national picture.” —Kirkus Reviews

Like the rosary itself, the influence of Catholicism on the social and historical development of the American West has been both visible and hidden: visible in the effects of personal conviction on lives and communities; hidden in that the fuller context of this important American religious group has been largely marginalized or undervalued in traditional historiographic treatments of the region. This volume, an outgrowth of the 2004 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, seeks to redress this imbalance. Editors Roberto R. Treviño and Richard Francaviglia have assembled here a variety of scholarly voices to present, according to the preface, "little-known stories about a religion whose traditions and adherents had until recently remained largely at the periphery of U.S. history narratives." The result is a work that offers at once a fuller portrait of the Catholic experience in and impact on the American West, and also tantalizing glimpses that are highly suggestive of fruitful areas for further study. The contributors to Catholicism in the American West bring to light the variety, the hardships, and, ultimately, some of the triumphs of Catholicism in the American West. These studies are fine examples of the scholarship currently "reshaping how historians understand the role of Catholicism both in the development of the West and in the broader history of the nation."