mortiz053

Map showing potential ranges of Soviet MRBM and IRMB missiles from Cuba. Source: JFK Library For thirteen days in October 1962, the world stood on the precipice of disaster as the United States and the Soviet Union faced off over the placement of Soviet missiles on the island of Cuba. The construction of nuclear missile sites just 90-miles off of the coast of the United States posed an existential national security threat and brought the Cold War superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. After days of tense discussions with his advisors about how to handle the unfolding crisis, President John F. Kennedy announced to the world that he would impose a naval “quarantine” to keep Soviet ships from delivering weapons to Cuba and demanded that Soviet Premier Khrushchev remove the missile sites from the island. The October 22 speech was broadcast to televisions and radios across the United States, but it also reached radios in Cuba—thanks in part to missionary radio station networks such as the...

Andrea L. Turpin     This fall I get to teach one of my favorite classes: my graduate course on Women, Gender, and Sex in American Religious History. One of the readings I assign for the first day is quite possibly my favorite historiographic essay of all time, Catherine Brekus's “Introduction: Searching for Women in Narratives of American Religious History,” in The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past , ed. Brekus (North Carolina, 2007). In this ten-year-old essay, Brekus examines why so many synthetic works of American religious history ignore women and why so many synthetic works of American women's history ignore religion. She makes a compelling case that the answer is not that scholarship on American women's religious history doesn't exist--and that both omissions leave our understanding of our collective past significantly impoverished. Yet five years after the release of The Religious History of American Women , the Decemb...

Maggie J. Elmore (on behalf of the Cushwa Center) This fall, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame will be hosting a series of events that will appeal to a wide array of scholars of American religion. As always, the events are free and open to the public. 1) Hibernian Lecture: "America and the Irish Revolution, 1916-1922"│Sept. 21 The 2018 Hibernian Lecture marks the fortieth anniversary of the relationship between the Hibernians and the Cushwa Center. In 1978, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians undertook a campaign to establish an endowment at the University of Notre Dame for illuminating the Irish heritage in America. This year's lecture features Ruán O'Donnell. O'Donnell is senior lecturer in history at the University of Limerick. His current research examines Irish radicalism and international pro-Irish Republican networks during the Irish Revolution. Details  here . 2) Publi...

I corresponded recently with Fr. David Endres about his new book , Many Tonges, One Faith: A History of Franciscan Parish Life in the United States. Fr. Endres is Associate Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at the Athenaeum of Ohio where he also serves as Dean. He is also the hardworking  editor of the US Catholic Historian. (1) Writing a history of Franciscan parishes is a huge undertaking. As you note, at the height Franciscan parish ministry in 1968, the order ran around 500 parishes and missions in the US. Tell the blog how you approached this challenge and why you settled on writing the history of fourteen specific parishes.  Unlike the Jesuits and Dominicans, among other religious communities, there have been almost no studies of US Franciscanism to date. That was the impetus for the United States Franciscan History Project under the direction of Jeffrey Burns and the Academy of American Franciscan History: to bring together scholars to reflect on diffe...