by Kevin Starr (Author)
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 Bartolom 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.
Author Biography
Kevin Starr received a B.A. from the University of San Francisco, an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and a Master of Library Science from U.C. Berkeley. He served as the City Librarian of San Francisco and the State Librarian of California. He was a University Professor and a Professor of History at the University of Southern California, where he served for fifteen years as a director of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies. Starr's many articles and books, including his Americans and the California Dream series, have earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, election to the Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society, the Presidential Medallion of the University of Southern California, the Centennial Medal of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the National Humanities Medal.