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Vols. 13-62 include abridged annual reports and proceedings of the annual meetings of the American Missionary Association, 1869-1908; v. 38-62 include abridged annual reports of the Society's Executive committee, 1883/84-1907/1908.
Twenty-three-year-old Laura Fish Judd left rural Massachusetts in 1827 for the Hawaiian islands, one of eighty young American women who enlisted in the effort to Christianize the islands between 1819 and 1850. Only a month before, after receiving a marriage proposal from a young physician in need of a wife to qualify for mission service, she had written in her diary: "'The die is cast.' I have in the strength of the Lord, consented Rebecca-like--I WILL GO, yes, I will leave friends, native land, everything for Jesus." Laura Judd and other ambitious young women consented to hasty marriages with virtual strangers to achieve their goal of carrying Christ's message to the heathen. As Patricia Grimshaw's compelling study makes clear, these women were driven by a desire for important, independent life-work that went well beyond their expected roles as dutiful wives. The ambitions, hopes, and fears of those eighty pioneer women make a poignant and fascinating story. But Paths of Duty does more than recount the experiences of a group of individuals. Grimshaw shows how the mission women reflected the larger society of which they were part, and through their story shed new light on the role of American Protestant mission in Hawaii. Although the women's public role in mission work was limited, they were highly influential in their daily and seemingly mundane interactions with Hawaiian women. The American women's ethnocentricity made them quite incapable of appreciating Hawaiian culture on its own terms, but their notions of proper femininity and female behavior were effectively transmitted to Hawaiian girls and women. Paths of Duty provides a deeper understanding of this neglected process of acculturation in the islands and its eventual implications for Hawaii's entry into the American sphere of influence.
A new biography of Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson (1788 - 1850), written to honor the 200th anniversary of his first mission trip from the U.S. to the Far East that would in turn mark the start of Americans joining the modern missions movement.
In the streets of Addis Ababa in 1977, shop-front posters illustrate Uncle Sam being strangled by an Ethiopian revolutionary, parliamentary leaders are executed, student protesters are gunned down, and Christian mission converts are targeted as imperialistic sympathizers. Into this world arrives sixteen-year-old Tim Bascom, whose missionary parents have brought their family from a small town in Kansas straight into Colonel Mengistu's Marxist "Red Terror." Running to the Fire focuses on the turbulent year the Bascom family experienced upon traveling into revolutionary Ethiopia. The teenage Bascom finds a paradoxical exhilaration in living so close to constant danger. At boarding school in Addis Ababa, where dorm parents demand morning devotions and forbid dancing, Bascom bonds with other youth due to a shared sense of threat. He falls in love for the first time, but the young couple is soon separated by the politics that affect all their lives. Across the country, missionaries are being held under house arrest while communist cadres seize their hospitals and schools. A friend's father is imprisoned as a suspected CIA agent; another is killed by raiding Somalis.
For more than a century missionaries were the main contact points between the Chinese and American peoples. Here, fourteen contributors studying both sides of the missionary effort, in China and in America, present case studies that suggest conclusions and themes for research.
Before Rwanda and Bosnia, and before the Holocaust, the first genocide of the twentieth century happened in Turkish Armenia in 1915, when approximately one million people were killed. This volume is an account of the American response to this atrocity. The first part sets up the framework for understanding the genocide: Sir Martin Gilbert, Vahakn Dadrian and Jay Winter provide an analytical setting for nine scholarly essays examining how Americans learned of this catastrophe and how they tried to help its victims. Knowledge and compassion, though, were not enough to stop the killings. A terrible precedent was born in 1915, one which has come to haunt the United States and other Western countries throughout the twentieth century and beyond. To read the essays in this volume is chastening: the dilemmas Americans faced when confronting evil on an unprecedented scale are not very different from the dilemmas we face today.
In 1854, American Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Egypt as part of a larger Anglo-American Protestant movement aiming for worldwide evangelization. Protected by British imperial power, and later by mounting American global influence, their enterprise flourished during the next century. American Evangelicals in Egypt follows the ongoing and often unexpected transformations initiated by missionary activities between the mid-nineteenth century and 1967--when the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War uprooted the Americans in Egypt. Heather Sharkey uses Arabic and English sources to shed light on the many facets of missionary encounters with Egyptians. These occurred through institutions, such as schools and hospitals, and through literacy programs and rural development projects that anticipated later efforts of NGOs. To Egyptian Muslims and Coptic Christians, missionaries presented new models for civic participation and for women's roles in collective worship and community life. At the same time, missionary efforts to convert Muslims and reform Copts stimulated new forms of Egyptian social activism and prompted nationalists to enact laws restricting missionary activities. Faced by Islamic strictures and customs regarding apostasy and conversion, and by expectations regarding the proper structure of Christian-Muslim relations, missionaries in Egypt set off debates about religious liberty that reverberate even today. Ultimately, the missionary experience in Egypt led to reconsiderations of mission policy and evangelism in ways that had long-term repercussions for the culture of American Protestantism.
Examines how representatives of evangelical mission societies in Britain and the US sought to introduce Protestant Christianity to Canton, Guadngdong Province, and the Qing-dominated Chinese empire in the decades before the Opium War. Reviews the cultural and political background of the efforts, and focuses on Robert Morrison of the London Missionary and his work in Canton. Adds insight not only into missionary work in China but also the Anglo-American cooperation that led to closer theological and institutional ties. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
David Eller is an American missionary in Venezuela, married to missionary nurse, Christie. Together they rescue homeless children in Caracas. But for David, that isn't enough. The supply of homeless children is endless because of massive poverty and the oppressive policies of the Venezuelan government, led by the Hugo Chavez- like Armando Guzman. In a moment of anger, David publicly rails against the government, unaware that someone dangerous might be listening- a revolutionary looking for recruits. David falls into an unimaginable nightmare of espionage, ending in a desperate, life-or-death gamble to flee the country with his wife and son, with all the resources of a corrupt dictatorship at their heels.
