Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America - The Colonial Experience

by Kevin Starr

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 Bartolomé 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.

Genres: Religion, American History, History, Catholic

675 pages, Hardcover

First published November 9, 2016

About the author

Kevin Starr was an American historian, best-known for his multi-volume series on the history of California, collectively called "America and the California Dream".

Reviews

[Jeff Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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."

Like most Catholic history this retelling is both maddening and inspiring. As a one-volume history of the exploration and evangelization of the Americas, this is excellent. There were bits and pieces of history I knew, but to see it all pieced together is great. Covers a lot of territories (pun intended as always).

This was his last book before he died in 2017.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally a book that openly admits that America's European history did not start with the English. There are few historians of Kevin's caliber.