American Protestantism Research Articles

The Presence of the Dead among U.S. Protestants, 1800–1848

Historians have long known that antebellum American Protestants were fascinated by death, but they have overlooked Protestant relationships with the dead. Long before the advent of séance Spiritualism in 1848, many mourners began to believe—contrary to mainstream Protestant theology—that the souls of the dead turned into angels, that the dead could return to earth as guardian angels, and that in graveyards one could experience communion with the spirits of the departed. The version of Protestantism these mourners developed was therefore, to use Robert Orsi's term, a religion of “presence,” a religion in which suprahuman beings—in addition to God—played an important role. Based on diaries and popular sentimental literature written mostly by women, this article brings to light an unexplored facet of antebellum Protestant lived religion: that the dead were “present with us tho’ invisible,” as one young woman wrote about her deceased sister.

The History and International Relations of American and French missionary universities in the Middle East and East Asia as a case of transnational professional relations

ABSTRACT This article combines History (the discipline) research with International Relations (sub-discipline of Political Science, my point of departure) for transnational studies research on long-term developments of transnational professional relations between the USA/Europe and the Middle East and East Asia through missionary universities. American Protestant and French Catholic missionaries were important transnational intellectuals and professionals who founded universities in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These universities continue to educate generations of transnational professionals. The article seeks to contribute in particular to the transnational studies dimension of International Relations drawing on educational, social and cultural history.

Lady Bountiful, Unashamed

Within its relatively narrow scope, this magnificently documented study of the largest of the global humanitarian projects of American Protestants in the 1890s and 1900s demonstrates that government officials of that era were happy to work with religious groups, and that philanthropy and global engagement were not limited to wealthy elites. Hundreds of thousands of churchgoers believed in a national mission to diminish the suffering experienced by all the varieties of humankind. That mission, Heather D. Curtis shows in her close reading of the period’s most popular religious periodical, the Christian Herald, was steeply hierarchical and invariably flattered an American self-conception as virtuous good Samaritans to the world. The whole story, she allows wisely, is “a cautionary tale” (293). Building on the solid foundation of Ian Tyrell’s Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2010) and Julia F. Irwin’s Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York, 2013), Curtis zeroes in on Louis Klopsch and Thomas Dewitt Talmage. These enterprising, flamboyant leaders of the Christian Herald drew much scorn for their tawdry sensationalism and shameless self-promotion even as they were highly successful in raising money to help famine victims in India and other needy populations. Talmage was one of the two most famous preachers of his generation, along with his Brooklyn neighbor, Henry Ward Beecher. Talmage’s sermons and tracts were read throughout the United States. In partnership with Klopch and in frank and often contentious competition with the American Red Cross led by Clara Barton, Talmage delivered impressive amounts of aid to non-whites in Asia and Latin America.

Religious Activities, Christian Media Consumption and Marital Quality among Protestants

Although associations between religiosity and marital quality have been demonstrated in previous research, mechanisms still remain unclear. Three 3-step hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine whether 10 individual, dyadic or family religious activities or uses of 7 forms of Christian media predicted positive relationship quality, negative interaction and intimate partner violence in a sample of North American Protestants. Joint spousal and family religious activities predicted higher levels of relationship quality. Individual activities, such as reading the Bible, and parent-child activities, such as praying with children and discussing Christians values with children, predicted lower levels of relationship quality. Listening to Christian talk radio and viewing Christian websites or blogs predicted lower levels of relationship quality. The authors inferred that individuals in low-quality relationships use activities such as reading the Bible, listening to Christian talk radio, and viewing Christian websites and blogs to seek information to improve relationships or promote healthy adaptation. Similarly, the authors speculated that praying with children and discussing spiritual values with them were seen as interventionary measures to protect children when parents were in low-quality relationships.

“The Real Victim of Lynch Law Is the Government”: American Protestant Anti-Lynching Advocacy and the Making of Law and Order

This article examines American Protestant anti-lynching advocacy in the early twentieth century. In contrast to African American Protestants, who framed their anti-lynching efforts in ways that foregrounded the problem of racism and black experiences of suffering, white mainline Protestant critiques of lynching regularly downplayed race and framed the crime in terms of its threat to American civilization and national law and order. This article connects these latter concerns to the national war on crime of the 1930s and 40s and the early history of the modern carceral state.

O romance missionário-protestante Candida: autoria feminina e relações de gênero na obra de Mary Hoge Wardlaw (séc. XIX-XX)

Dentre os inúmeros escritos produzidos por missionários protestantes que trabalharam no Brasil durante o século XIX está um romance publicado nos Estados Unidos no ano de 1902 intitulado Candida; or, by a way she knew not. A story from Ceara, o qual teve por autora a missionária presbiteriana Mary Hoge Wardlaw. Esta obra de caráter ficcional apontava como objetivo demonstrar aos seus leitores o processo de inserção do protestantismo na Província do Ceará na década de 1880. Não obstante, mais do que um relato de atuação missionária, o romance de Mrs. Wardlaw também se inseriu em um contexto de ampliação do espectro de atuação feminina no universo protestante norte-americano do fim do século XIX e princípio do século XX. Neste momento várias mulheres, através da ação missionária e da escrita (de memórias, cartas, romances, etc.) operaram determinado protagonismo feminino inserido em uma rede de relações assimétricas de gênero, atuando constantemente no campo de acomodações e astúcias. O presente artigo visa discutir, tendo por foco a obra de Mrs. Wardlaw, de que modo algumas missionárias protestantes em terras estrangeiras – por vezes negligenciadas em estudos acerca do protestantismo – atuaram e expuseram suas visões de mundo ao mesmo tempo em que estavam inseridas em um amplo e complexo jogo de relações de gênero, onde negociações e enfrentamentos nem sempre são de fácil percepção.

Ideology and Morality in Host Language Learning: American Protestants in the Former Yugoslavia

ABSTRACTAmerican Protestants serving overseas must learn their host communities’ “heart” language from the twin moral imperative to minimize their burden on host partners and to embody their faith through their language practice. Language learning thus has moral consequences; not merely proficiency attainment, but faithfulness and calling are at stake. The author, a Protestant himself, conducted an ethnography of Americans serving in a Protestant organization at field sites in Bosnia and Slovenia. Two ideologies emerged from this study and were analyzed as a polycentric system exerting moral authority. These were (a) a dogmatic ideology of using the “right” language, the “national” or “heart language” corresponding to a people group, and (b) a pragmatic ideology of using “whatever” linguistic resources available to convey their gospel. These ideologies overlapped and shifted over time, with consequences for fieldworkers’ longevity, the linguistic ecology of host communities, and Christian understandings of language learning.

American Catholics and “The Use and Abuse of Reading,” 1865–1873

ABSTRACTIn the wake of the Civil War, Father Isaac Hecker launched several publishing ventures to advance his dream of a Catholic America, but he and his partners soon found themselves embroiled in a debate with other American Catholics, notably his friend and fellow convert Orestes Brownson, over the “use and abuse of reading.” Although the debate was certainly part of a contemporary conversation about the compatibility of Catholicism and American culture, this essay argues that it was equally rooted in a moment of American anxiety over a shifting social order, a moment when antebellum faith in the individual was being tested by the rights claims of women and Americans of color. Tacitly accepting and internalizing historical claims of intrinsic and through-going Catholic “difference,” claims offered both by American Protestants and American Catholics like Brownson, scholars often presume that debates within American Catholicism reflect “Catholic” concerns first and foremost, qualifying their utility as sources of “American” cultural history. By examining American Catholic discussions of reading, individual liberty, social order, and gender in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay argues that Brownson's arguments against the compatibility of American and Catholic life were in fact far more representative of ascendant ideas in American culture than Hecker's hopeful visions of a Catholic American future made manifest through the power of reading. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways that American Catholicism can be a valuable and complex site for studying the broader history of religion and culture in the United States.

The Mainline in Late Modernity: Tradition and Innovation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America by Maren Freudenberg

Reviewed by: The Mainline in Late Modernity: Tradition and Innovation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America by Maren Freudenberg Aaron Klink The Mainline in Late Modernity: Tradition and Innovation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. By Maren Freudenberg. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018. 233 pp. This book attempts to situate the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in the changing landscape of North American Protestantism. Theoretically framed by sociological studies of the changing nature of American religion, it also draws from the author’s extensive field work among pastors, laypeople, bishops, synod staff, and seminary leaders in Wisconsin and Minnesota to [End Page 113] assess ways that different levels of church leadership understood and addressed change. By combining quantitative and qualitative dimensions of research on denominations, a rare thing to attempt in current literature, this book makes an especially important contribution to research on denominations. Freudenberg argues that Lutheranism’s doctrinal tradition makes it a “cognitive” tradition defined by confessions, rigorous theology, and focus on liturgical worship. She contrasts this theologically based tradition with denominations such as the Vineyard, or communities that claim to be part of the “emerging church” movement that are defined by emotions and subjectivity. But framing that debate neglects the fact that Lutheran doctrine is often designed to promote emotional responses such as trust, fear, or gratitude in the lives of the believers. The book also chooses to frame major divisions among Lutherans not as between “conservative” and “liberal” but rather between “confessionalists” and “pietists.” The book explores several tensions within the ELCA from both sociological and theological perspectives. She notes an increasing flattening of the leadership structure. Indeed, there are fewer and fewer employees at the ELCA churchwide headquarters and fewer deployed staff. Those of us who have watched the decisions know that they have often been about funding matters more than changes in theological understandings of leadership. So one questions if this is a transformation or a theology born of necessity. The author notes that change in the ELCA often seems to be driven not by people in the pews (one recent meme I received noted that Lutherans don’t like change), but by pastors and denominational officials. She argues that Lutheranism is becoming less clerical which is to say pastor-driven and instead leans toward lay leadership. She argues that this shift is in response to culture, but seemingly neglects that such a move is deeply embedded in Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of the believer. Certainly, some congregations are more “pastor-driven” than others, depending on both the pastor and the congregational laity. So overall trends are difficult to define from a sample this small and geographically compact. The book also explores worship. She mentions innovative ELCA pastors who change liturgical forms, but do so in ways that are both novel but still within confessional frameworks. Pastors allow [End Page 114] tradition to take form in new ways. In the same way, she argues that Lutherans are trying to get parishioners to think more carefully about faith practices in daily life, such as reading the scriptures, prayer, and even being aware of miracles. None of these practices are distinct to Lutheranism but they have not been practiced by many Lutheran laity on a regular basis. Freudenberg also explores how pastors and communities are trying to find Lutheran ways to practice spirituality in daily life. It is this need to bring what they learn on Sundays into the rest of the week that many Americans seek. She notes that a focus on prayer, asking congregants to look for God’s action in daily life, even amid the miraculous, are crucial parts of this new spirituality. Freudenberg’s work has methodological limitations. Despite asserting that her sample is representative, those of us who live and work in Lutheran contexts in the United States know that Lutheranism in the upper Midwest is socially and culturally different then Lutheranism in New England or on the West Coast. Innovations in various contexts would probably look different in form and content. She also asserts that urban churches are not representative of overall dynamics in the ELCA but that rural and semi-urban churches do reflect those...

David P. Cline, From Reconciliation to Revolution: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 276. $85.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

David P. Cline, <i>From Reconciliation to Revolution: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement</i>. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 276. $85.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism by Sarah Imhoff

Reviewed by: Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism by Sarah Imhoff Riv-Ellen Prell Sarah Imhoff. Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Vii + 312 pp., 4 b&w illustrations. Hardcover $85, paper $38, ebook $37.99. ISBN 978-0-253-02606-4, 978-0-253-02621-7, 978-0-253-02636-1. Sarah Imhoff suggests that Jewish masculinity in the United States has been almost entirely overlooked by scholars. Despite their more than forty-year [End Page 79] engagement with the study of the lives of American Jewish women, barely a handful of such studies exist for Jewish men. Beyond the scholarship on “roles” and activities, the study of gender as a dynamic force in American Jewish life is similarly focused on women rather than men or masculinity. In its “unmarked,” role, to use a linguistic term, Jewish masculinity is the norm of American Jewish political, cultural, and organizational life, and it has escaped significant analysis. Imhoff argues that, rather than seeking a generic American Jewish masculinity in the early twentieth century in the United States, she is interested in one crucial part of that population. She chose to study “acculturated” Jewish men in order to understand how they were shaped by a set of concepts and ideas that were different from Christians or Eastern European Jewish immigrants of the time. Similarly, she argues that understanding the lives of ordinary, rather than exceptional, men will more effectively provide an understanding of the ideas that shaped Jewish masculinity. That ideas that grounded American Jewish masculinity for acculturated Jewish men were “universalism” and “rationality.” They were more than a variation on Christian ideas of the time, particularly diverging from the significance of physical prowess for Christian manhood. Just as Christians linked their notions of male virtue to Christianity, so did acculturated Jewish men believe that what they most prized as masculine was central to the principles of the Reform Judaism with which they most likely identified. Therefore, Imhoff’s analysis of American Jewish masculinity simultaneously offers an analysis of the development of Reform Judaism. American Judaism was constructed simultaneously with American Jewish masculinity, she argues. The two were mutually constitutive. Her serious attention to ideation and religious construction through a lens of a gender analysis is an important contribution. Imhoff builds her case for the mutual construction of Jewish masculinity and Reform Judaism by an analysis of the American Reform thinkers. They viewed Judaism as built on the ideas of rationality and universalism, and envisioned its modern formulation as vastly superior to the other Judaisms of various forms of Orthodoxy. This ennobling message of Judaism could speak to all, Jewish or not. As Imhoff argues, these principles have deep roots in very Western notions of masculinity, and thus Judaism was simultaneously religious, American, and masculine. However, in contrast to American Protestantism of the era, it did not depend on a “muscular” or hyper-masculine vision. Nor did it reject the presence of women or minimize their place in the synagogue. Nevertheless, the Jewish male body did play a role in the ideology of Jewish masculinity. Imhoff draws on and analyzes a number of interesting examples that reveal the importance of a healthy body. Indeed, it is her close reading and unexpected juxtapositions of movements, cultural analogies, and ideas that are a real strength of this book. For example, the Galveston Movement, which directed Jewish immigrants to live away from cities in [End Page 80] the West, offers a well-developed example of how ideas about a healthy male body, physical labor, a connection to the land, and perhaps surprisingly, a modern Judaism were all critical to acculturated Jews’ aspirations for Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The Galveston Movement was brief (1907–1914), but Imhoff effectively and imaginatively demonstrates that it was a paradigm of this vision. Acculturated Jewish leaders who differed on Zionism could agree on the importance of directing immigrant Jews away from the city and to land and the West. Israel Zangwill and Jacob Schiff, among others, envisioned a new American Jewish life on the land for immigrants who needed to be transformed through physical labor into exemplary American men. They worked with a...

Silk-Stocking Sympathy: American Whig Rhetoric and the Irish Famine

Silk-Stocking Sympathy:American Whig Rhetoric and the Irish Famine James M. Farrell (bio) On 11 November 1844 J. W. Mighels of Portland, Maine, wrote a letter to Henry Clay, who had just been defeated in the presidential election. Mighels styled himself a "native born Whig" and blamed Clay's loss in Maine on "an army of Irish paupers, set on and marsheled [sic] by their infernal priest."1 It was a view widely shared among members of the Whig Party, who felt the sting of defeat to James Polk and the Democrats. Clay's own running mate Theodore Frelinghuysen attributed the Whig electoral downfall to an "alliance of the foreign vote and that most impracticable of all organizations, the abolitionists." The Irish immigrant vote in New York City, he said, "was tremendous," and "it is an alarming fact that this foreign vote has decided the great questions of American policy—and counteracted a nation's gratitude."2 Clay lost the 1844 presidential election by a little more than 39,000 votes. More importantly, he lost electoral-college votes in several states like New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Maine, and Michigan that had been won by the Whigs in 1840. In the earlier election William Henry Harrison carried nineteen states for the Whig ticket. Clay and the Whigs won only eleven states in the subsequent presidential election. Of course, there are many reasons why any particular election turns out the way it does: the candidates are different, the issues are different, the electorate is different. In 1844 American voters were concerned about the annexation of Texas, the dispute with [End Page 206] Great Britain over the Oregon Territory, and the growing influence of antislavery sentiment in an American politics that was becoming increasingly sectional.3 But the 1840s also saw a surge in immigration, particularly among the Germans and the Irish, most of whom were also Catholic. At the beginning of the nineteenth century about half-a-million Irish had settled in the United States. By 1845 another one million Irish immigrants had made America their home.4 Thus, even before the Great Famine, the Irish had become a potent political force in America, particularly in the urban areas of the eastern seaboard. Throughout the nineteenth century, and especially as their numbers grew, the Irish overwhelmingly favored the Democratic Party, and thus Irish political influence posed an existential threat to the Whig Party.5 Irish alignment with the Democratic Party is not difficult to understand. From its formative days as the coalesced opposition to Andrew Jackson, the Whig Party sought to be the conservative force in American politics. They were the party of business and wealth, and the party of moral reform. The Whigs attracted most of their support from the established ranks of middle- and upper-class American Protestants. They were, as one historian suggested, "anglophile elites."6 Although not all Whigs were bigots, the Whig Party had a virulent anti-Catholic element that continually fed nativist sentiment within its ranks. Most northern Whigs were also antislavery, a position that [End Page 207] put them at odds with Irish voters who mostly opposed the abolition of slavery, and who consistently expressed hostility toward both British and American abolitionists.7 From the Irish perspective the Whigs were "the party of Yankee Protestants and British-American immigrants," whereas the Democrats were more welcoming to Irish newcomers and more tolerant of their religion.8 Democrats portrayed Whigs as an elitist association of "narrow-minded, silk-stocking patricians bent on telling other people how to behave."9 For obvious reasons, elitist attitudes compounded with nativist sentiments and religious bigotry cannot form the foundation of a successful national political strategy, as Henry Clay and the Whigs had learned. "There can be no doubt of the greatness of the evil of this constant manufacture of American citizens out of foreign emigrants," Clay wrote to John Crittenden after his election loss. The most recent Irish immigrants, he thought, were "incapable of justly appreciating the duties incident to the new character which they assume."10 Indeed, during the 1844 election postmortem, "the belief that Clay was denied the presidency by the votes of immigrant Catholics became...

“The world food crisis is not a fad”: TheMore-with-LessCookbook and Protestant Environmental Spirituality

ABSTRACTThis article examines the spirituality reflected in the 1976 cookbookMore-with-Less. Written by a former Mennonite missionary hoping to provide religious households with a practical way to respond to world hunger, the cookbook's message of a simple diet that could transform users' influence on the world is an early example of the religious environmentalism that has grown increasingly popular among middle-class American Protestants in the last several decades. By examining its historical context, narrating its genesis, and critically assessing the spirituality it recommended, this article argues that the cookbook provides a useful window into Protestant environmental spirituality, its version of which allowed practitioners to maintain traditional institutional relationships and conceptions of the divine while cultivating the individuated religiosity increasingly sought after in modern culture. Emerging in the institutional overlap of traditional religious organizations and the putatively secular formations of mass media, globalization, and consumer culture, the cookbook leveraged the incipient emphasis on lifestyle choices within consumer culture to craft an individuated response to a vision of the world in permanent crisis.More-with-Lessand the Protestant environmental spirituality it represents shed light on current scholarly debates about the form religion takes within modern contexts of secularity, especially when religious practitioners seek adaptations that can maintain traditional theological and organizational commitments.

“Hail Luther’s Contribution”

AbstractMartin Luther was and remains a controversial figure whose contentious legacy has been used to serve a variety of agendas over the centuries. Nowhere is this better seen than in the use of Luther as symbol during the Cold War years in the United States. As American Protestants responded to the social, cultural, and political changes that defined this period they re-interpreted Luther in surprising ways to suit their own needs. Drawing on film, Roman Catholic responses, debates among scholars, Pentecostal, ecumenical, and political representations, this essay argues that Luther’s memory, as a lieu de mèmoire, was used during the Cold War era to promote whatever cause or concern interpreters wanted to associate with his name and legacy.

Saving Germany. North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945–1974, by James C. Enns

Saving Germany. North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945–1974, by James C. Enns

Comparing the RELTRAD and Born‐Again/Evangelical Self‐Identification Approaches to Measuring American Protestantism

AbstractThe question of how Protestantism (including evangelicalism) is measured in social science research is of keen importance to those seeking to understand religion in American life. In this article, we compare and contrast two of the leading techniques for classifying Protestants. One of these approaches (the RELTRAD approach) categorizes respondents as evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, or black Protestants mainly on the basis of their denominational affiliation. By contrast, the self‐identification method utilizes information about a respondent's race and a yes/no question that asks respondents directly whether they consider themselves born‐again or evangelical Christians to create similar categories. We show that there is considerable overlap, though not perfect correlation, between the two approaches. Both methods produce similar estimates of the size of Protestant subgroups, and they paint similar religious and demographic portraits of the evangelical, mainline, and black Protestant communities. As a result, we argue that the self‐identification method can be an effective proxy for RELTRAD when RELTRAD is unavailable as a measurement option.

Infidel America: Puritan Legacy and Antebellum Religious Persecution in Frederick Douglass’s Transatlantic Speeches, 1841–49

Abstract This essay examines Frederick Douglass’s oratory of the 1840s, when religious appeals drove his abolitionist rhetoric. In addressing the lack of critical attention paid to his early oratory and evangelism, the essay argues that these speeches, which he delivered to audiences in the US North and Europe, offer an incisive transatlantic critique of the religious roots of American exceptionalism by attacking American Protestantism and the growing mythology of the nation’s Puritan origins. Douglass’s early speeches undercut the celebration of Puritan ancestry by Daniel Webster, George Bancroft, and others; provide a thick description of US antebellum religious persecution in both the North and South; and deploy missionary rhetoric to call on European Protestant churches to remake their US counterparts. For 1840s Douglass, slavery in the United States was not a result of the country failing to live up to its founding republican principles, an argument he would make in subsequent decades. Rather, the more radical and zealous appraisal of the country he offered at that time was that the country’s founding reliance on slavery and servitude meant that it was, at core, an apostate nation in need of Christian conversion.

“All Our Children May be Taught of God”: Sunday Schools and the Roles of Childhood and Youth in Creating Evangelical Benevolence

Merging religious history with childhood studies, this article analyzes the rise of the Sunday school movement to show how concepts of childhood, and young people themselves, helped shape early American religious culture. Religious disestablishment, republican concerns about virtue, and romanticized reconstructions of childhood led to a heightened focus on young people within late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Protestant reform movements. The resulting dissemination of Sunday schools across the country established physical and imagined communities of faith dedicated exclusively to young people. They also fostered unprecedented levels of youth religious leadership by allowing adolescents to serve as teachers, challenging inherited patterns of social and cultural authority. Sunday schools thereby became transformative and transactional spaces where young people could both shape and be shaped by the growing Protestant community. This article describes this synergistic relationship between childhood, youth, and Protestant benevolence by examining the two related educational models that emerged within the Sunday school movement in the early national period. The first, exemplified by republican-humanitarian Sunday schools founded in the late eighteenth century, emphasized literacy instruction for the purpose of creating a virtuous citizenry. The second model also aspired to create virtuous citizens, but it envisioned using Sunday schools primarily to evangelize and sanctify the nation. The increasing emphasis on evangelism produced an even more significant structural shift: the transformation of Sunday schools into child-centric institutions that facilitated youth religious leadership. This in turn helped inaugurate a period within American Christianity when institutions and ministries were designed specifically for children on mass scale, permanently altering the religious landscape and redistributing spiritual authority to more marginalized groups, including young people themselves. By revealing how age became an increasingly crucial factor in determining the shape and substance of religious experiences, this article demonstrates that ideals and anxieties about childhood helped create volunteerism, which in turn reshaped the structure of American Protestantism while simultaneously contributing to the formation of a broader child-centric culture that persists in the modern day.

Women, missionaries, and medical professions: the history of overseas female students in Meiji Japan

The Meiji government did little to develop higher education for women in Japan, leading ambitious women, such as Tsuda Umeko, to cross the Pacific Ocean to seek opportunities for advanced studies. In the field of medicine, male physicians received training from their German counterparts, while female physicians, such as Yoshioka Yayoi, studied medicine under Japanese instructors. Nevertheless, some women did study medicine at American medical colleges in Meiji Japan. This article sheds light on seven American-educated female physicians who took advantage of a globalising trend – the rise of American Protestant missions. American female missionaries provided opportunities for Japanese women in both the teaching and medical professions. However, women’s overseas medical studies were short-lived because of the changing political climate and evolution in the medical domain at the end of the nineteenth century. At this point, as the likelihood of Japanese women going abroad for medical studies diminished, American missionaries shifted their focus to nursing education.

“To Make the World One in Christ Jesus”

Scholarship on nineteenth-century missionary encounters emphasizes either how native converts “indigenized” Christian doctrine and practice, or how missionaries acted as agents of Western imperial expansion. These approaches, however, overlook the ways both missionaries and converts understood Protestant Christianity as a call to transnational community. This essay examines the ways that American Protestants and East Asian Christian converts looked for ways to build a transpacific communion. Despite radically different understandings of Christian scripture, and despite the geopolitics of empire, U.S. and East Asian Protestants nevertheless strove to bring together diverse theologies and experiences into a loosely defined, transnational Protestant community.