Over the course of the twentieth century Catholics who make up a quarter of the population of the United States made significant contributions to American culture politics and society They built powerful political machines in Chicago Boston and New York led influential labor unions created the largest private school system in the nation and established a vast network of hospitals orphanages and charitable organizations Yet in both scholarly and popular works of history the distinctive presence and agency of Catholics as Catholics is almost entirely absent In this book R Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings bring together American historians of race politics social theory labor and gender to address this lacuna detailing in cogent and wide ranging essays how Catholics negotiated gender relations raised children thought about war and peace navigated the workplace and the marketplace and imagined their place in the national myth of origins and ends A long overdue corrective Catholics in the American Century restores Catholicism to its rightful place in the American story Contributors R Scott Appleby University of Notre Dame Lizabeth Cohen Harvard University Kathleen Sprows Cummings University of Notre Dame R Marie Griffith Washington University in St Louis David G Gutierrez University of California San Diego Wilfred McClay University of Tennessee at Chattanooga John T McGreevy University of Notre Dame Robert Orsi Northwestern University Thomas Sugrue University of Pennsylvania