Foreign Missionaries & American Diplomacy in the 19th Century

Unsung History

In 1812, when the United States was still a young nation and its State Department was tiny, American citizens began heading around the world as Christian missionaries. Early in the 19th Century, the US government often saw missionaries as experts on the politics, culture, and language of regions like China and the Sandwich Islands, but as the State Department expanded its own global footprint, it became increasingly concerned about missionary troubles.

Joining me in this episode is Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz, Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University and author of Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Jesus, Love of My Soul,” written by Charles Wesley and performed by Simeon Butler March and Henry Burr on February 25, 1916; the audio is in the public domain and available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is from the Jubilee Story of the China Inland Mission, Marshall Broomhall, Morgan & Scott, London, 1915; it is in the public domain.

Additional Sources:

• “Were Christian missionaries ‘foundational’ to the United States?” by Emily Conroy-Krutz, The Washington Post, October 18, 2018.
• “Into All the World: the Story of Haystack [video,]” Chaplain Rick Spalding, Williams College, September 25, 2013.
• “American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions historical documents,” Global Ministries.
• “The life and letters of Samuel Wells Williams, LL.D., missionary, diplomatist, Sinologue,” by Frederick Wells Williams, 1889.
• “Missionary Movement - Timeline Movement,” The Association of Religion Data Archives.
• “The Foreign Missionary Movement in the 19th and early 20th Centuries,” by Daniel H. Bays, National Humanities center.
• “A History of the United States Department of State, 1789-1996,” Released by the Office of the Historian, July 1996.
• “About,” United States Department of State.
• “In 200-year tradition, most Christian missionaries are American,” by Daniel Lovering, Reuters, February 20, 2012.

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