Editor, publisher, translator, and historian, John Dawson Gilmary Shea has been called by his Roman Catholic biographers the "father of American Catholic history." Author of more than two hundred and forty publications touching every aspect of the Catholic experience in America, founder of Catholic historical societies, and editor of Catholic and secular historical journals, Shea certainly deserved that accolade. However, his more than forty years of labor amounted to more than a detailed chronicle of the history of the Catholic Church. Through study of the institutions of the Church, Shea delineated a continuous history of America that began with Christopher Columbus's discovery of the New World in 1492 and stretched unbroken to Shea's own time. His researches centered upon the French and Spanish periods of American history and presented objective but sympathetic characterizations of French and Spanish explorers, missionaries, and settlers. At a time when most American histories were...