Progressivism has been notoriously hard to define, not least because progressives have been so diverse in their views and positions. They came in virtually all shapes, sizes, and opinions. One group, however, has seldom been included under the progressive umbrella, and that is American Catholics. But consider the credentials of Edward Osgood Brown, born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1847 to a long-established Yankee sea-faring family, who migrated to Chicago in 1872 and died there in 1923.

Mention James Harvey Robinson and most students of American history will think two words: “New History.” Robinson tried to articulate what better-known historians of the period – Charles Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington – were doing in their research and writing. As Richard Hofstadter explained, the leading historians of the Progressive Era tried “to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment.…They attempted to find a usable past related to the broadest needs of a nation fully launched upon its own industrialization, and to make history an active instrument of self-recognition and self-improvement.” Situated firmly in the “revolt against formalism” that marked Progressive Era intellectual work, historians made their research instrumental, teasing out what William James called the “cash value” of ideas. Historical writing could no longer, in Robinson's own words, “catalogue mere names of person and places which have not the least importance for the reader.” Rather, it had to “help us understand ourselves and our fellows and the problems and prospects of mankind.” In those words and his pioneering (though largely forgotten) work in European and intellectual history, Robinson codified the purpose of what has come to be known as Progressive history.

Have you ever wondered about the origin of the phrase: “If you want peace, work for justice?” I recently saw it on a bumper sticker that attributed the slogan to Pope Paul VI, and if you go to the Vatican sites for his annual peace messages between 1967 and 1969, you will find the general sentiment there. But the origin of the idea that peace requires social justice – not just the absence of warfare – is much older. In the twentieth century United States this idea originated in Jane Addams' book, Newer Ideals of Peace, published in 1907.