Documentary Sources in the United States for Foreign Missions Research: A Select Bibliography and Checklist

1985 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-29
Author(s):  
Robert Shuster
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Select Bibliography

Ethnohistory's Ethnohistory

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Michael E. Harkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Theoretical Orientation ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
European Contact ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Foundational Work

This article examines the first decades of the field of ethnohistory as it developed in the United States. It participated in the general rapprochement between history and anthropology of mid-twentieth-century social science. However, unlike parallel developments in Europe and in other research areas, ethnohistory specifically arose out of the study of American Indian communities in the era of the Indian Claims Commission. Thus ethnohistory developed from a pragmatic rather than a theoretical orientation, with practitioners testifying both in favor of and against claims. Methodology was flexible, with both documentary sources and ethnographic methods employed to the degree that each was feasible. One way that ethnohistory was innovative was the degree to which women played prominent roles in its development. By the end of the first decade, the field was becoming broader and more willing to engage both theoretical and ethical issues raised by the foundational work. In particular, the geographic scope began to reach well beyond North America, especially to Latin America, where archival resources and the opportunities for ethnographic research were plentiful, but also to areas such as Melanesia, where recent European contact allowed researchers to observe the early postcontact period directly and to address the associated theoretical questions with greater authority. Ethnohistory is thus an important example of a field of study that grew organically without an overarching figure or conscious plan but that nevertheless came to engage central issues in cultural and historical analysis.

Mid-Nineteenth Century New England Women in Evangelical Foreign Missions: Seraphina Haynes Everett, A Missionary Wife in The Ottoman Mission Field

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-102
Author(s):  
Melike Tokay-Ünal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Women’S Perceptions ◽  
Islam And Christianity ◽  
Mission Field ◽  
Journal Entries

This article illustrates American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ support of the “missionary matrimony”, mid-nineteenth-century New England women’s perceptions of the missionary career obtained through matrimony, and their impressions of the Oriental mission fields and non-Christian or non-Protestant women, who were depicted as victims to be saved. A brief introduction to New England women’s involvement in foreign missions will continue with the driving force that led these women to leave the United States for far mission fields in the second part of the paper. This context will be exemplified with the story of a New England missionary wife. The analysis consists of the journal entries and letters of Seraphina Haynes Everett of Ottoman mission field. The writings of this woman from New England give detailed information about the spiritual voyage she was taking in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman lands. In her letters to the United States, Everett described two Ottoman cities, Izmir (Smyrna) and Istanbul (Constantinople), and wrote about her impressions of Islam and Christianity as practiced in the Ottoman empire. Everett’s opinions of the Ottoman empire, which encouraged more American women to devote themselves to the education and to the evangelization of Armenian women of the Ottoman empire in the middle of the nineteenth century, conclude the paper.

Documenting Earthquakes in the United States of the Ionian Islands, 1815–1864

2020 ◽  
Vol 91 (5) ◽  
pp. 2554-2562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paola Albini
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ionian Islands ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Seismic Scenarios ◽  
Few Data ◽  
Earthquake Effects ◽  
High Level

Abstract The seven islands of Corfu, Paxoi, Kephalonia, Ithaca, Lefkada, Zakynthos, and Cythera (Ionian Sea, offshore western Greece) were a British protectorate with the name of “United States of the Ionian Islands” between 1815 and 1864. Although many earthquake studies have already examined the past seismicity of this area, they contain only a few data for a handful of earthquakes, for an area known to be characterized by a high level of seismicity. Against this fragmentary seismological knowledge stands a 50 yr abundant production of local documentary sources of different types and in diverse languages. For this reason and because most of the available sources had not been yet nor systematically looked into in the search for testimonies of earthquake effects, an ad hoc and comprehensive investigation was carried out. The number of records on earthquake effects is huge as well as unexpected, and the quality of the collected records is high. The 147 new macroseismic European Macroseismic Scale 1998 intensity values, accurately assigned on the basis of independent contemporary records only, are presented in the form of timelines of earthquake effects for the main towns of the four islands of Corfu, Kephalonia, Lefkada, and Zakynthos. Besides partially amending the gaps of the knowledge of these 50 yr of seismicity in the Ionian Islands, the great amount of freshly collected data suggests that historical seismological research may effectively contribute to improving the seismic scenarios of past earthquakes in many areas of the world.

Christianity in Hawaiʻi

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Williams Jr.
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Kanaka Maoli ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Hawaiian Kingdom

On January 17, 1893, Her Majesty Queen Liliʻuokalani, sovereign of the Hawaiian Kingdom, was overthrown in a coup de main led by a faction of business leaders comprised largely of descendants of the 1820 American Protestant mission to the “Sandwich Islands.” Rev. Charles Hyde, an officer of the ecclesiastic Papa Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian Board) declared, “Hawaii is the first Country in which the American missionaries have labored, whose political relations to the United States have been changed as a result of missionary labors.” The actions of these “Sons of the Mission” were enabled by U.S. naval forces landed from the USS Boston the evening prior. Despite blatant and significant connections between early Christian missionaries to Hawaiʻi and their entrepreneurial progeny, the 1893 usurpation of native rule was not the result of a teleological seventy-year presence in the Hawaiian Kingdom by the American Protestant Church. An 1863 transfer of authority over the Hawaiian mission from the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to the local ʻAhahui ʻEuanelio o Hawaiʻi (AEH) (Hawaiian Evangelical Association) served as a pivotal inflection point that decidedly altered the original mission, driving a political and economic agenda masked only by the professed goals of the ecclesiastic institution. Christianity, conveyed to the Hawaiian Islands initially by representatives of the ABCFM, became a contested tool of religio-political significance amidst competing foreign and native claims on leadership in both church and state. In the immediate aftermath of the January 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom government, this introduced religion became a central tool of the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) struggle for a return of their queen and the continued independence of their nation. Native Christian patriots organized and conducted a broad array of political actions from within the churches of the AEH using claims on Ke Akua (God) and Christianity as a foundation for their vision of continued native rule. These efforts were instrumental in the defeat of two proposed treaties of annexation of their country—1893 and 1897—before the United States, declaring control of the archipelago a strategic necessity in fighting the Spanish/Filipino–American War, took possession of Hawaiʻi in late 1898. Widespread Americanization efforts in the islands during the early 20th century filtered into Hawaiʻi’s Christian churches, transforming many of these previous focal points of relative radicalism into conservative defenders of the American way. A late-20th-century resurgence of cultural and political activism among Kanaka Maoli, fostered by a “Hawaiian Renaissance” begun in the 1970s, has driven a public and academic reexamination of the past and present role of Christianity in this current-day American outpost in the center of the Pacific.

Proposal for Compilation of a Guide to Unpublished Documentation Relating to Africa in the United States

1962 ◽  
Vol 5 (01) ◽  
pp. 14-19
Author(s):  
Morris Rieger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Far East ◽  
The United States ◽  
Library Of Congress ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Equatorial Africa ◽  
Peabody Museum ◽  
General Guide ◽  
Southern Rhodesia

The variety and volume of Africa-related record, archival and manuscript materials in the United States today are only partially known. However, in view of the extensive American commercial, missionary, philanthropic, scientific, governmental and other contacts with the African continent over the past three centuries or more, as well as the activities of manuscript collectors, the total is probably quite considerable. Illustrative of what is already known to exist are the following descriptive entries adapted from a recently published general guide to the archival and manuscript holdings of American depositories: (1) papers of Zachary Macaulay--philanthropist, abolitionist, editor, and early Governor of Sierra Leone -- and his family, 1793-1888, 1014 pieces (in the Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California); (2) archives of the American Colonization Society, including materials on Liberia, 1816-19 08, 626 vols., 32 boxes, and 4 bundles (in the Library of Congress); (3) papers of Edmund Roberts, merchant, diplomatic agent in the Far East and Africa, and negotiator of the 1833 commercial treaty between the United States and Zanzibar, 1805-36, 10 vols, and 5 boxes (in the Library of Congress); (4) papers of Richard Palmer Waters during his ante-bellum term as U. S. Consul in Zanzibar (in the Peabody Museum, Salem, Massachusetts); (5) papers of Henry S. Sanford, Minister to Belgium, associate of Leopold II in connection with his Congo operations, and member of the American delegation to the 1884-85 Berlin African Congress, 1838-91, c. 10,000 pieces (in the Sanford Memorial Library, Sanford, Florida); (6) papers of John A. Kasson, politician, diplomat, and head of the American delegation to the Berlin Congress, 1877-1910, c. 1 200 items (at the Iowa State Department of History and Archives, Des Moines, Iowa); and (7) records of the foreign missionary activities of the Congregational churches (chiefly) in Angola, 1880-date, French Equatorial Africa, 1842-70, Liberia, 1834-42, South Africa, 1835-date, and Southern Rhodesia, 1893-date (among the materials deposited by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions at the Houghton Library, Harvard University).

American Foreign Mission Movement, c . 1870–1920s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy Neal Leavelle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
American Women ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Foreign Mission ◽  
Mission Movement

The American foreign mission movement at the turn of the 20th century adopted as its watchword “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” The rapid expansion of missionary boards and the enthusiasm of volunteers and supporters corresponded with European and US colonial expansion around the world. For many evangelical observers, the opening of the world seemed to offer the greatest opportunity yet to share the gospel with all. “The crisis of missions,” as one prominent author put it, required that Christians recognize the spiritual importance of this moment. Divine providence appeared to be removing obstacles to evangelization. Failure to act decisively would be a form of apostasy, an abandonment of responsibility toward God and the world. Inspired by a revivalistic spirit, women and men joined a growing list of missionary and moral reform organizations. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions continued the work it had started in the early 19th century. New organizations like the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and the World Student Christian Federation created networks that linked Christian evangelists and communities around the world. They published magazines, books, and pamphlets and sent inspectors, organizers, and speakers on tours of the United States and Great Britain and on grand transoceanic voyages. In 1910 the movement celebrated progress and planned for next steps at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. Steeped in a sense of moral and racial superiority, attendees promised to transform the world. Women found an increasingly important place in the US foreign missionary movement, especially as evangelical work diversified to include the establishment of schools and medical missions. American women labored in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere and eventually made up the majority of workers in the field. Women brought with them an ideology of domesticity that they hoped to share with their sisters abroad. Women from the US viewed local women in the missions as socially degraded and in desperate need of moral uplift. The moral authority that came with female standing in the home seemed to explain the elevated status and Christian liberty enjoyed by American women. At the same time, as more highly educated single women entered the field, the movement created space for new models of womanhood. These “New Women” lived independent lives out in the world, apart from the confines of the home. American missionaries at the turn of the century became deeply entangled in the imperial connections of the United States and the world. While it would be a mistake to reduce their work simply to a particular strand of imperialism, it is important to understand their connections to American expansion. Missionaries took advantage of openings created by colonial activity and contributed to the spread of American cultural, political, and economic influence at a critical moment in the development of national power in the international arena.

New Religious Movements in the Long Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-17
Author(s):  
Lydia Willsky-Ciollo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
New Religions ◽  
The Impact

This introduction provides a brief overview of the period known as the “long nineteenth century,” which played host to and helped to shape numerous new religious movements. Highlighting the impact and occasional convergence of various political, social, and religious movements and events in both the United States and globally, this essay seeks to show that the examination of new religious movements in the nineteenth century offers a means of applying scholarship in new religious movements to religions that may be defined as “old,” while simultaneously opening new ways of understanding new religions more broadly. In the process, this overview provides background for the articles included in this special issue of Nova Religio, which explore subjects including religious utopianism; gender, politics, and Pentecostalism; Mormonism and foreign missions; and the relationships of new religious movements to visual art.

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