Panel 5: Contested Community and Cultural Spaces

Event Title

Motives for Violence: The Burning of the Ursuline Convent at Charlestown, 1834

Location

Campus Center, Room 3540, University of Massachusetts Boston

Start Date

29-3-2014 10:45 AM

End Date

29-3-2014 12:00 PM

Description

The 1834 burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, MA — present day Somerville, MA — has been remembered in the historiography of the Early American Republic as an event that marked a highpoint in anti-Catholic activities and rhetoric. Although anti-Catholic feelings and sentiments certainly contributed to the burning of the convent, the present study seeks to explain how a number of other social factors seem to have existed more prominently in causing the destruction of the convent that were not explicitly anti-Catholic in nature. Local issues and concerns related to ethnicity, class, gender, in addition to irrational suspicions all played an important role in what brought about the destruction of the Ursuline convent. This somewhat revisionist view of the burning of the convent seeks not to deny the inherent anti-Catholic nature of the event, but seeks to highlight the other more prominent social factors that brought about the destruction of the convent in order to arrive at a better understanding of the nature and scope of anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century Boston. An investigation of said social factors reveals that the violence carried out against the Ursuline convent was preformed primarily by those of the lower, laboring class of Charlestown, and motivated by concerns unrelated to serious, intellectual objections to the tenets of the Catholic faith.

Comments

PANEL 5 of the 2013 Graduate History Conference features presentations and papers under the topic of "Contested Community and Cultural Spaces."

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Mar 29th, 10:45 AM Mar 29th, 12:00 PM

Motives for Violence: The Burning of the Ursuline Convent at Charlestown, 1834

Campus Center, Room 3540, University of Massachusetts Boston

The 1834 burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, MA — present day Somerville, MA — has been remembered in the historiography of the Early American Republic as an event that marked a highpoint in anti-Catholic activities and rhetoric. Although anti-Catholic feelings and sentiments certainly contributed to the burning of the convent, the present study seeks to explain how a number of other social factors seem to have existed more prominently in causing the destruction of the convent that were not explicitly anti-Catholic in nature. Local issues and concerns related to ethnicity, class, gender, in addition to irrational suspicions all played an important role in what brought about the destruction of the Ursuline convent. This somewhat revisionist view of the burning of the convent seeks not to deny the inherent anti-Catholic nature of the event, but seeks to highlight the other more prominent social factors that brought about the destruction of the convent in order to arrive at a better understanding of the nature and scope of anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century Boston. An investigation of said social factors reveals that the violence carried out against the Ursuline convent was preformed primarily by those of the lower, laboring class of Charlestown, and motivated by concerns unrelated to serious, intellectual objections to the tenets of the Catholic faith.