Salacious Convent Exposés Were the Most Popular Books in Antebellum America | Hacker News Reader

Salacious Convent Exposés Were the Most Popular Books in Antebellum America

atlasobscura.com

21 pointssamclemens10 comments

An edition of one of the titles discussed in the article, "The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk," is available at Project Gutenberg here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8095

For a recent view that covers this troubling period, see:

America Aflame - How the Civil War Created a Nation, by David Goldfield

I wouldn't normally read a story like this, but for some reason I clicked.

Apparently anti-Catholic books were popular in the 1830's thru the Civil War. One very popular one "had been ghostwritten by a group of anti-Catholic men". A lot of this sentiment was because "Protestant America was being transformed by Catholic immigrants, and the Catholic Church was becoming the largest single religious institution in the country".

Just something to think about in light of the current islamophobia about Muslim immigration to the USA.

Yep. I tried to explain the history of know-nothingism to my Irish catholic parents and they seem completely unable to make the connection. "Well of course when they said Irish Catholics were lazy, violent pope worshippers, that was just bigotry."

It really is fascinating to learn about the anti-Catholic hysteria of a hundred years ago.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-catholic-scare-20151209-... describes an extremely successful anti-Catholic newspaper. I found a copy of it in the Library of Congress here:

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89066178/

The KKK when starting out had a very strong anti catholic bent and that a lot of the original KKK members where from protestant parts of Scotland.

Really? I thought it was the 2nd incarnation of the Klan that was known for anti-Catholicism. I thought the first incarnation was basically pro-Confederacy terrorists who probably cared little about Catholicism.

It's probably important to remember that despite the anti-Catholic hysteria the Church did have a few issues. For example: http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-mass-grave-ireland-201703...

What issue does that story raise? I mean, any besides the obvious that it is not ideal to bury the dead without having a record?

Though also worth noting that Muslims make up about 1% of the US population[1] so they are a very long way from being the largest religious institution in this country.

1: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/06/a-new-estima...

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