Article- 21 pages
- Level: university
This 2018 article, published in the journal Ohio Valley History, revolves around the Cincinnati Observatory, the oldest professional observatory in the United States and the first public observatory in the Western Hemisphere. The full title of the article is “The Triumph of the Cross: President John Quincy Adams, Archbishop John Baptist Purcell, and the Reclamation of Cincinnati’s Mount Adams as a Sacred Site”. The author of the article, C. Walker Gollar, is Professor of Church History at Xavier University in Cincinnati. Mount Adams was the original site of the observatory, and the article traces conflict related to the observatory that stemmed in part from remarks that Adams gave in a speech for the founding of the observatory, in which Adams claimed that St. Ignatius Loyola founded the Inquisition. The article also traces the parallel history of the observatory and of a Catholic church on Mount Adams, as well as changing views about science both in the United States and among Catholics in the area of the observatory.
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