Holywood: Lights, Cameras, and Catholics in the Age of American Spectacle

Can Catholic culture be American culture? Between 1850 and 1925, as millions of Catholic immigrants arrived on the shores of Protestant America, this old question confronted a new national reality. Advertising, film, theatre, jazz--American popular culture was coming of age in both exuberance and scope. The old order was passing away. Less than a century elapsed between Harper's Weekly publishing Thomas Nast's "The American River Ganges" to 56 million Americans tuning in to watch the televised spectacle of Jackie Kennedy's White House. How?ⷯⷯ

Although many observers noted the declining influence of traditional religion during this period, Holywood argues that the enormous American appetite for spectacle had profound religious significance. Ambrose investigates the sources and significance of interwar enthusiasm for public expressions of Catholicism and argues that these disruptions of modernity (even while using the technologies of modernity) enhanced Catholicism's appeal for Protestant American spectators. Americans grew to accept their Catholic neighbors not through attending mass, but by going to the movies, to the theatre, and to the press.â·¯ Holywood examines three striking episodes of interwar Catholic visual culture and shows what they reveal about the mutual influence of Catholicism, American religiosity, and popular culture.â·¯