Brokers of Culture : Italian Jesuits in the American West, 1848-1919

Brokers of Culture examines the interactions among multiple ethnic groups in the American West and a group of nearly four hundred Italian Jesuits who emigrated to the United States after 1848 in the wake of the Italian unification movement. The first wave of exiles taught in Jesuit colleges on the East Coast, where they played a major role in reforming American seminary education. From their eastern base, the dispersed clerics moved to the frontier, shaping the evolution of culture in eleven western states. The Jesuits' most powerful source of influence was their western colleges, which adhered to educational traditions brought from Europe while simultaneously meeting the needs of an ethnically mixed and mobile frontier population. Brokers of Culture analyzes how Italian Jesuit missionary emigres attempted to integrate a heterogeneous western population (Native Americans, Hispanics, European immigrants, and native-born Americans) into a global religious community while simultaneously facilitating those groups' entry into American society.