Explore the vast range of titles available.

In America after the Civil War, the emancipation of four million slaves and the explosion of Chinese immigration fundamentally challenged traditional ideas about who belonged in the national polity. As Americans struggled to redefine citizenship in the United States, the \"Negro Problem\" and the \"Chinese Question\" dominated the debate. During this turbulent period, which witnessed the Supreme Court'sPlessy v. Fergusondecision and passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, among other restrictive measures, American Baptists promoted religion instead of race as the primary marker of citizenship. Through its domestic missionary wing, the American Baptist Home Missionary Society, Baptists ministered to former slaves in the South and Chinese immigrants on the Pacific coast. Espousing an ideology of evangelical nationalism, in which the country would be united around Christianity rather than a particular race or creed, Baptists advocated inclusion of Chinese and African Americans in the national polity. Their hope for a Christian nation hinged on the social transformation of these two groups through spiritual and educational uplift. By 1900, the Society had helped establish important institutions that are still active today, including the Chinese Baptist Church and many historically black colleges and universities.Citizens of a Christian Nationchronicles the intertwined lives of African Americans, Chinese Americans, and the white missionaries who ministered to them. It traces the radical, religious, and nationalist ideology of the domestic mission movement, examining both the opportunities provided by the egalitarian tradition of evangelical Christianity and the limits imposed by its assumptions of cultural difference. The book further explores how blacks and Chinese reimagined the evangelical nationalist project to suit their own needs and hopes. Historian Derek Chang brings together for the first time African American and Chinese American religious histories through a multitiered local, regional, national, and even transnational analysis of race, nationalism, and evangelical thought and practice.

In February 1862, General Ambrose E. Burnside led Union forces to victory at the Battle of Roanoke Island. As word spread that the Union army had established a foothold in eastern North Carolina, slaves from the surrounding area streamed across Federal lines seeking freedom. By early 1863, nearly 1,000 refugees had gathered on Roanoke Island, working together to create a thriving community that included a school and several churches. As the settlement expanded, the Reverend Horace James, an army chaplain from Massachusetts, was appointed to oversee the establishment of a freedmen's colony there. James and his missionary assistants sought to instill evangelical fervor and northern republican values in the colonists, who numbered nearly 3,500 by 1865, through a plan that included education, small-scale land ownership, and a system of wage labor. Time Full of Trial tells the story of the Roanoke Island freedmen's colony from its contraband-camp beginnings to the conflict over land ownership that led to its demise in 1867. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Patricia Click traces the struggles and successes of this long-overlooked yet significant attempt at building what the Reverend James hoped would be the model for \"a new social order\" in the postwar South.

Reforming the World offers a sophisticated account of how and why, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American missionaries and moral reformers undertook work abroad at an unprecedented rate and scale. Looking at various organizations such as the Young Men's Christian Association and the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, Ian Tyrrell describes the influence that the export of American values had back home, and explores the methods and networks used by reformers to fashion a global and nonterritorial empire. He follows the transnational American response to internal pressures, the European colonies, and dynamic changes in global society.

In 1877, the African American musical ensemble known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers traveled to Germany to raise money for their university. The choir's ten-month tour provided German listeners with one of their first significant and sustained encounters with African Americans and African American culture in the nineteenth century. As listeners throughout Germany heard the ensemble perform, they began to debate the Fisk Jubilee Singer's musical, cultural, and ethnic origins. At the heart of their growing ethnomusicological and anthropological interest in the Jubilee Singer's music was the question of whether or not African Americans were fulfilling the powerful promise of the civilizing mission: Were they proof that people of the black diaspora were capable of accepting \"Western\" art music and cultural values? This article illustrates how African American music contributed to global conversations on the civilizing mission in the nineteenth century.

Even into the first decades of the nineteenth century, as geographic mobility increased and urban areas grew in size, most Americans were said to live in places dominated by face-to-face interactions and personal relationships.1 What a difference a couple of decades makes. [...]while Atlantic history has encouraged historians of the early American republic to expand their geographic horizons, it does not necessarily require a reconceptualization of the entire field.6 Global history, on the other hand, demands something more.

Historians of religion and Reconstruction, particularly those who have centered African Americans in the post-emancipation South, have sharpened and enriched interpretations of the Reconstruction period by demonstrating churches centrality to the larger struggles of the period. Since these scholars have focused largely on religious institutions in the aftermath of the end of slavery, they have necessarily examined the issues of racism, interracial interactions, and racial identity formation. Scholarship on religion and race after emancipation has centered religious institutions in ways that have allowed the important theme of racial power to come to the forefront. [...]of Days (2016), Matthew Harper explores how Black Protestant Christians in North Carolina used their eschatological thoughts about the end times to interpret their political landscape and opportunities after emancipation.4 While the book focuses primarily on ideas, its key intervention lies in carefully examining biblical interpretation as a source of political inspiration, thereby bringing greater specificity to how Black religion influenced post-emancipation politics. [...]given that these organizations and opportunities long predated Reconstruction, the skills and political participation practices freedpeople demonstrated were longstanding. [...]these more recent examinations of religious spaces as political grounds build on earlier works that centered denominational missionary organizations' efforts to help freedpeople after emancipation.

This essay recontextualizes the Yale Report of 1828, arguing that the report’s advocacy for classical liberal education should be understood alongside the racial concerns of its authors, some of whom were well-known colonizationists who viewed African American education as a threat to New Haven’s social and economic stability. The Yale Report’s vision for leadership and economic success not only excluded African Americans by default, but created a lasting binary that defined Black educational opportunities in the nineteenth century and beyond. The essay considers the near overlap between the writing of the Yale Report and the failed proposal to establish an African American men’s college in New Haven in 1831, placing the document within a key period in the history of American higher education in which education became highly commodified and racialized. Building upon scholarship on the Yale Report that has already considered its neorepublican aims, this essay opens the possibility of viewing the document beyond its immediate concerns with curricular reform and contemplating the elusive connections between American higher education, race, and power.

This book explores the parameters of the African Methodist Episcopal Church's dual existence as evangelical Christians and as children of Ham, and how the denomination relied on both the rhetoric of evangelicalism and heathenism.

This article examines the crucial role that print media played in the global expansion of American evangelicalism during the late 1890s: a moment when the United States was exercising new forms of military, economic, and cultural power to extend its influence in world affairs. Analyzing the strategies that publicists employed to make the popular press an effective medium of spreading American evangelicalism sheds light on the theological and social factors that influenced – and circumscribed – the ways in which evangelicals imagined, fostered, and undermined the creation of a global Christian community in this increasingly imperial era.