As we have seen in the past three days, religion, and specifically anti-Catholicism, were in the air the colonial Americans breathed and played a significant role in shaping the ideology that led to the American Revolution. Ours was a Revolution driven by ideas. But, those ideas maintained their currency largely because events conspired to keep the fires of anti-Catholic bigotry hot. Today, I will look at an important new book by Robert Emmett Curran, Papist Devils, Catholic in British America, 1574-1783.
Curran achieves a great deal in this book. For myself, I have never before encountered any historical treatment of the colonial Catholic populations in the British colonies in the West Indies and had no idea that so many Irish Catholics had emigrated there. That history does not concern me with this week’s theme, but it is interesting and worth reading.
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