Intestine Enemies: Catholics in Protestant America, 1605-1791: A Documentary History

Intestine Enemies: Catholics in Protestant America, 1605—1791, is a documentary survey of the experience of Roman Catholics in the British Atlantic world from Maryland to Barbados and Nova Scotia to Jamaica over the course of the two centuries that spanned colonization to independence. It covers the first faltering efforts of the British Catholic community to establish colonies in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; to their presence in the proprietary and royal colonies of the seventeenth century where policies of formal or practical toleration allowed Catholics some freedom for civic or religious participation; to their marginalization throughout the British Empire by the political revolution of 1688; to their transformation from aliens to citizens through their disproportionate contribution to the wars in the latter half of that century as a consequence of which half of the colonies of Britain’s American Empire gained their independence. The volume organizes representative documents from a wide array of public and private records—broadsides, newspapers, and legislative acts to correspondence, diaries, and reports—into topical chapters bridged by contextualized introductions. It affords students and readers in general the opportunity to have first-hand access to history. It serves also as a complement to Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574– 1783 (The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), a narrative history of the same topic.

Robert Emmett Curran is professor emeritus at Georgetown University and author of Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1800–1915 and Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783, both CUA Press.