Book Review

Canada and the United States

The last twenty-five years have witnessed the flourishing of historical studies on Catholic schooling in America. Boston, Chicago, and Milwaukee have all been subjects of critical histories aimed at illuminating the formation and development of parochial education. JoEllen McNergney Vinyard's study of Detroit from 1805 to 1925 is a welcome addition to this literature.	1
For Vinyard, the story of Catholic education is rooted in the immigrants who created Detroit Catholicism during this period. Early beginnings appeared to offer the irenic hope of genuinely common educational arrangements. By century's end, however, controversies over use of the King James Bible, which demarcated the public schools as evangelically Protestant in tone, together with rising nativism convinced Catholics that preservation of their culture necessitated parish schools. Thus, "by the 1880s a generation of Detroit Catholics had pieced together the reasons, form, and funds for educating their children separately" (p. 85).	2
Vinyard comprehensively chronicles these stories of institutional formation. Her book is especially rich in its detailed exposition of the individual immigrant groups that sought to sustain and advance their heritages and provide for their children's upward mobility. The book is strongest in the attention paid to communities of religious sisters who staffed the schools. Vinyard rightly recognizes these women, largely ignored in comparable studies, as key because they made such schools economically feasible and became major agents of cultural transmission to their pupils.	. . .