The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History

Though its high price may keep it out of the reach of individual scholars, this collection of academic essays about the missionary movement should be on the shelves of every college and university library. High-profile scholars such as Grant Wacker, Edith Blumhofer and Laurie Maffly-Kipp investigate how the foreign missionary enterprise changed people on the home front, arguing that ""the standard textbooks on U.S. history have virtually ignored the missionary's domestic significance."" How did missionaries who served abroad change the course of American social and cultural history in the 19th and 20th centuries? Memorable essays explore the evolution of race consciousness, drawing from the experiences of black missionaries to Liberia and Haiti; Protestant missionary efforts to Roman Catholics, African-Americans, and Mormons within the boundaries of the United States; and the waning of the missionary impulse after WWII, using missionary-author Pearl S. Buck's gradual liberalization as a barometer for the evolution of the entire Protestant missionary movement. This is a weighty and worthy anthology. (Feb.)