A Story of Gifts: Becoming a Historian of American Catholicism

Leslie Woodcock Tentler

Not long after Christmas, I was seated next to Nelson Minnich, editor of this publication, at a Washington dinner party. "How's the essay coming?" was practically the first thing he said to me. Now, it's true that I'd missed several deadlines for this particular assignment, although my excuses were impeccable, given that I was finishing a book manuscript and preparing it for publication. But Nelson had correctly intuited that my heart wasn't in this particular assignment. "It's rather like writing your own obituary," I pointed out. "One can view it that way," he responded. "But I prefer to think of it as an opportunity to express gratitude for the gifts one receives over the course of a long career." Duly chastened, I agreed to meet the upcoming deadline. That I managed to do so is largely due to Nelson's reframing of the project, the valedictory aspects of which were indeed inhibiting me. So I thank him for his typically gracious counsel. Mine has in fact been a story of gifts, and it has been good to acknowledge it. This is perhaps especially true with regard to the gifts that arrived oddly packaged.

I came to the University of Michigan in the fall of 1963 as an exceedingly green but eager freshman. I had no firm ideas about a major, although I opted with genuine excitement for Sociology 100 as my lone first-semester elective. The subject had not been taught at my excellent suburban high school, which was probably part of its attraction. It was also something of a natural for someone with parents like mine—both of them veterans of the labor movement and long-time political activists. All such electives, however, required the approval of the honors program's director, then a formidable professor of German literature. "Oh no, my dear," he said as he drew a thick line through "Sociology 100" on my course election card. "You belong in History 101"—which in those days was the first half of Western Civ. Although I would be community organizing with a radical student group by the following summer and acquiring fluency in rights-talk, I was capable in the moment of nothing but meek assent. History 101 it was. I quickly fell in love with the subject and, after an appropriately lengthy interval, also with the instructor, a brand-new assistant professor by the name of Thomas Tentler.

My passion for the history of late medieval and early modern Europe quickened in subsequent semesters. So did my taste for political activism. I remember a hurried journey south in the spring of my sophomore year to participate in civil rights demonstrations in Montgomery, Alabama, then at the epicenter of the struggle over voting rights. I heard Lyndon Johnson propose the 1965 Voting Rights Act in a speech before a joint session of Congress while sitting with fellow marchers on a darkened Montgomery street that had troopers on horseback at both ends. They too were listening via transistor radio, and when Johnson said "we shall overcome" in his inimitable Texas drawl, those hitherto terrifying troopers sagged visibly in their saddles. The experience, still vivid in memory, helped to shape the historian I became, not just in terms of my interpretive biases but in a more immediate sense, as well. Shortly after my return, I enrolled for the following semester in a section of the junior honors seminar devoted to the Renaissance. The class, as it happened, was oversubscribed, which prompted the presiding professor to query each student as to his or her extracurricular activities. Upon hearing my account, in which the Montgomery experience figured, he promptly ejected me from the class and assigned me to an inexplicably under-enrolled section on the U.S. Civil War.

My assent to this second instance of professorial high-handedness was something less than meek. But as in the case of the earlier instance, this one proved to be a gift. It was in Professor William Freehling's splendid...