BELOVED STRANGERS: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth-Century America
Anne C. Rose, . . Harvard Univ., $39.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-674-00640-9
Penn State's Rose shows that interfaith marriage is nothing new; here, she charts the practice from the War of 1812 to World War I, introducing readers to over two dozen intermarried couples. We meet politicians (North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance married a Catholic), the children of religious leaders (Helen Wise, the daughter of Rabbi Isaac Wise, married a Christian) and ordinary intermarried folk. Rose treats marriages that were interfaith from day one and, even more intriguing, also those marriages in which Protestant wives shocked their Protestant husbands by converting to Catholicism. She pays careful attention to how intermarriage was discussed—by pastors, journalists and novelists (Charles Brockden Brown's
Reviewed on: 07/30/2001
Genre: Nonfiction