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Jon Gjerde's Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America is a perfectly titled book about how bumptious dialogues among America's variegated Catholics and their frequent, mostly Protestant critics became a major component in creating the modern American nation. The genius of Gjerde's approach is to set American anti-Catholicism within a far broader context of complex, interweaving dialogues about the kind of society America could and should become, especially in economics, church-state relations, and women's and men's roles, plus the deep arguments about slavery. Few histories have been both so American and so Catholic as is Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America. The book is a luminous testament to Jon Gjerde's achievements as a historian and scholar. -Jon Butler, Yale University This book expands our understanding the motives of both Catholics and those Protestants who were hostile to Catholics. It demonstrates that the mid-19th century quarrel over Catholicism's place in the constitutional and cultural order of the United States deeply influenced the theory and practice of nationhood well into the 20th century. -David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley A shrewd, thoughtful examination of how religious diversity-notably Catholic immigration to the United States in the nineteenth century-prompted fundamental, often still unresolved questions about the character of religious freedom and American nationalism. -John T. McGreevy, I.A. O'Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters and Professor of History, University of Notre Dame

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Jon Gjerde (February 25, 1953–October 26, 2008) was an American historian and the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he also served as chair of the History Department and Dean of the Division of Social Sciences in the College of Letters and Science. He is the author of the award-winning From Peasants to Farmers: The Migration from Balestrand, Norway, to the Upper Middle West and The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830–1917. S. Deborah Kang is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a specialist in the areas of American legal, western and immigration history and the author of The Legal Construction of the Borderlands: The INS, Immigration Law, and Immigrant Rights on the U.S.-Mexico Border, which will be published in 2012.

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