The 2020 Election - Recommended Reading to Understand Our History

 

Pioneer Priests and Makeshift Altars: A History of Catholicism in the Thirteen Colonies

In this comprehensive history, Fr. Charles Connor details the life of Catholics in the American Colonies. It's a tale that begins with the flight of English Catholics to religious freedom in Maryland in 1634, and continues through the post-Revolutionary period, by which time the constitutions of all but four of the first 13 states contained harsh anti-Catholic provisions. 

Catholic readers will be proud to learn from that despite almost two centuries of ever-more-intense religious persecutions and even harsher legal prohibitions, American Catholics in the colonies simply refused to abandon the Catholic Faith.

This is an indispensable reading for souls interested in the deep roots of Catholicism in America, and in the holy courage of scores of Catholics who kept remorseless forces from driving Catholicism out of America. Among other things, you'll learn:

The tale of The Ark and The Dove that carried the first settlers to Maryland

The surprisingly harsh anti-Catholic sentiments of most of the Founding Fathers

The Quaker/Catholic alliance that promoted both religions

The role of persecuted Catholics in the Revolutionary War

Why, in that War, many Catholics favored the anti-Catholic British

The French Jesuits who evangelized New York and its frontier areas, and the saints who were martyred there

The years in which, throughout the colonies, Catholics became an endangered species

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Faith and Fury: The Rise of Catholicism During the Civil War

In the bloody Civil War that split our nation, American bishops worked for the success of the Union . . . and of the Confederacy! As Catholics slaughtered Catholics, pious priests on both sides prayed God to give success in battle. . . to their own side. Men in blue and men in gray flinched at the Consecration as cannonballs (fired by Catholic opponents) rained down on them during battlefield Masses.

Many are the moving and often surprising stories in these pages of brave Catholics on both sides of the conflict stories told by Fr. Charles Connor, one of our country s foremost experts on Catholic American history.

Through searing anecdotes and learned analysis, Fr. Connor here shows how the tumult, tragedy, and bravery of the War forged a new American identity, even as it created a new American Catholic identity, as Catholics often new immigrants found themselves on both sides of the conflict.

Fr. Connor s account shows that in the nineteenth century and on both sides of the conflict, the Church in America was a combination of visionary leadership and moral blindness much as is the Church in America today. From consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, Catholics today will discover ways to bridge the gulf that today divides so many in our Church and in our nation.

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Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has sold more than 2.5 million copies. It is pushed by Hollywood celebrities, defended by university professors who know better, and assigned in high school and college classrooms to teach students that American history is nothing more than a litany of oppression, slavery, and exploitation. 

Zinn’s history is popular, but it is also massively wrong.

Scholar Mary Grabar exposes just how wrong in her stunning new book Debunking Howard Zinn, which demolishes Zinn’s Marxist talking points that now dominate American education. 

In Debunking Howard Zinn, you’ll learn, contra Zinn: 

• How Columbus was not a genocidal maniac, and was, in fact, a defender of Indians
• Why the American Indians were not feminist-communist sexual revolutionaries ahead of their time
• How the United States was founded to protect liberty, not white males’ ill-gotten wealth
• Why Americans of the “Greatest Generation” were not the equivalent of Nazi war criminals 
• How the Viet Cong were not well-meaning community leaders advocating for local self-rule
• Why the Black Panthers were not civil rights leaders

Grabar also reveals Zinn’s bag of dishonest rhetorical tricks: his slavish reliance on partisan history, explicit rejection of historical balance, and selective quotation of sources to make them say the exact opposite of what their authors intended. If you care about America’s past—and our future—you need this book.