My work—studying Roman Catholics in the South during the American Civil War— is a remedy to a two-directional historiographical neglect. Much of American Catholic scholarship focuses on the twentieth century (especially the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath), the North, and issues of race, class, urbanization, and gender giving sparse treatment to the nineteenth century South; when the nineteenth century is discussed the focus is once more usually on the North, immigration, and societal tensions between Catholics and Protestants. On the other hand, Civil War religious scholarship is largely Protestant in nature and while treating the nineteenth century South there is sparse coverage of how Catholicism fits within this paradigm. My work addresses both issues, adding the nineteenth century Southern voice to American Catholic scholarship and the Catholic voice to Civil War religious studies. My work is a study of allegiance and the interplay between religious and political attachments. Clergy—Catholic bishops, priests (usually chaplains), sisters, and the Pope, Pius IX—are the main characters of the study with a lay component present as well via Catholic soldiers. I argue that all of the Catholics of my study were fully “Confederatized,” committed to and involved in the Southern nation and cause, and both “devout Catholics and devoted Confederates.” They found no tension between their faith and their politics and lived both allegiances to the maximum with chaplains and soldiers the most ardent Confederates. The one exception to the “devoted Confederates” label were Catholic nuns. They were almost exclusively focused on their faith and providing spiritual and medical assistance to the men they ministered to in their role as Sister-nurses. While the Sister-nurses were apolitical their participation in the Confederate cause as battlefield medics shows the all encompassing involvement of Southern Catholics in the Confederacy—as soldiers, medics, and religious and social leaders as the bishops were, and both men and women, clergy and laity—and demonstrates that future studies of American Catholic, and Civil War religious, history can no longer overlook these men and women.

Darius Hubert (1823‒1893), a French-born Jesuit, made his home in Louisiana in the 1840s and served churches and schools in Grand Coteau, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. In 1861, he pronounced a blessing at the Louisiana Secession Convention and became the first chaplain of any denomination appointed to Confederate service. Hubert served with the First Louisiana Infantry in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia for the entirety of the war, afterward returning to New Orleans, where he continued his ministry among veterans as a trusted pastor and comrade. One of just three full-time Catholic chaplains in Lee’s army, only Hubert returned permanently to the South after surrender. In postwar New Orleans, he was unanimously elected chaplain of the veterans of the eastern campaign and became well-known for his eloquent public prayers at memorial events, funerals of prominent figures such as Jefferson Davis, and dedications of Confederate monuments. In this first-ever biography of Hubert, Katherine Bentley Jeffrey offers a far-reaching account of his extraordinary life. Born in revolutionary France, Hubert entered the Society of Jesus as a young man and left his homeland with fellow Jesuits to join the New Orleans mission. In antebellum Louisiana, he interacted with slaves and free people of color, felt the effects of anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit propaganda, experienced disputes and dysfunction with the trustees of his Baton Rouge church, and survived a near-fatal encounter with Know-Nothing vigilantism. As a chaplain with the Army of Northern Virginia, Hubert witnessed harrowing battles and their equally traumatic aftermath in surgeons’ tents and hospitals. After the war, he was a spiritual director, friend, mentor, and intermediary in the fractious and politically divided Crescent City, where he both honored Confederate memory and promoted reconciliation and social harmony. Hubert’s complicated and tumultuous life is notable both for its connection to the most compelling events of the era and its illumination of the complex and unexpected ways religion intersected with politics, war, and war’s repercussions.

Bringing the wisdom of generations of black Catholics into conversation with contemporary scholarly accounts of racism, Christ Divided diagnoses ""antiblackness supremacy"" as a corporate vice that inhabits the body of Christ. To truly understand racial inequality, theologians must acknowledge the existence of ""antiblackness supremacy"" and recognize its uniquely foundational role in prevailing processes of racialization and racial hierarchy. In addition to introducing a new framework of racial analysis, this book proposes a new approach to virtue ethics. Because the church‘s participation in and performance of white supremacy occurs as a result of corporate habituation, the church most needs new habits, not new teachings. The theory of corporate virtue outlined here provides a framework through which to evaluate these habits and propose new ones-to be made to "do the right thing."

Seventy Years in Dixie: Recollections and Sayings of T. W. Caskey and Others by Fletcher Srygley Douglas, first published in 1891, is a rare manuscript, the original residing in one of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, which has been scanned and cleaned by state-of-the-art publishing tools for better readability and enhanced appreciation. Restoration Editors' mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life. Some smudges, annotations or unclear text may still exist, due to permanent damage to the original work. We believe the literary significance of the text justifies offering this reproduction, allowing a new generation to appreciate it.

Searching for the Dixie Barbecue, with its thought-provoking text and many black and white photos, is a culinary and cultural saga. Here are glimpses of a fragment of society still tenaciously clinging to deep-rooted, primal instincts; to legends of the American frontier; and to the hand-me-down, rural traditions of the Deep South. This is a story about (among other things) regional pride, homespun cookery, backwoods lore, self-effacing redneck humor, shameless braggadocio, macho self-imagery, carnivorous bravado, porcine fundamentalism, boldfaced lies, and both culinary and social intransigence. This book will supply you with the elusive answers to three questions: What is real barbecue? How do you find it? and What does it mean to be Southern?

What do America's children learn about American history, American values, and human decency? Who decides? In this absorbing book, Jonathan Zimmerman tells the dramatic story of conflict, compromise, and more conflict over the teaching of history and morality in twentieth-century America. In history, whose stories are told, and how? As Zimmerman reveals, multiculturalism began long ago. Starting in the 1920s, various immigrant groups--the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, even the newly arrived Eastern European Jews--urged school systems and textbook publishers to include their stories in the teaching of American history. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s brought similar criticism of the white version of American history, and in the end, textbooks and curricula have offered a more inclusive account of American progress in freedom and justice. But moral and religious education, Zimmerman argues, will remain on much thornier ground. In battles over school prayer or sex education, each side argues from such deeply held beliefs that they rarely understand one another's reasoning, let alone find a middle ground for compromise. Here there have been no resolutions to calm the teaching of history. All the same, Zimmerman argues, the strong American tradition of pluralism has softened the edges of the most rigorous moral and religious absolutism.