Autorentext

MASSIMO DI GIOACCHINO is a historian of the late modern transatlantic world. He currently serves as Director of the Research Initiative on Global Italian Religious Networks at the Department of Italian Studies at New York University. The migration of peoples and ideas between Europe and the United States in the late modern period (1776-1945) is his central theme. His transnational approach combines religious studies, migration studies, and social history, with a strong focus on Italian migrations to the United States and American Protestant missions to Italy. Di Gioacchino is the supervisor of two international research projects: William Burt's Italian Papers and Italian Religious Life in New York City: A Digital Reconstruction (1860-1921). He has published extensively in notable American and Italian journals, including the Catholic Historical Review and Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni, and is a contributor to Storia dei Valdesi (2024), Metodisti in Italia (2024), Brill's Global History of Italian Protestantism (forthcoming 2025), and the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani of the Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani.

Klappentext

The Ruin of Souls presents a new history of Italian Catholic life in the United States, from the founding of the first Italian Catholic church in the United States in 1853 to the end of the immigration flow as a result of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. In this book, the product of wide research in American and Roman archives that spans the last twelve years, Di Gioacchino invites the reader to look at the religious history of the Italian Catholic immigrants in the United States not through the lens of their devotional culture, but through the perspective of their ecclesiastical life. More specifically, the book aims to document the efforts, problems, and failures of the Roman Catholic Church of the time to preserve the allegiance of the Italian immigrants in the United States to the Church's magisterium and authority. Strengthened by largely unknown archival documentation and an original historiographic methodology, the work reveals a new political dimension in the religious history of Italian immigrants in the United States and their relationship with the Catholic religious canon. By integrating the analysis of the ecclesial practices of the Italian communities into a far-reaching epistemological reflection, the work also contributes to the continuing discussion of how we study and examine the religious practices of Catholic communities in the modern era.