The Role of the American Board in the World
Bicentennial Reflections on the Organization's Missionary Work, 1810–2010
Edited by Clifford Putney, Paul T. Burlin
- Book Description
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was the country's first creator of overseas Christian missions. Founded in 1810 and supported by a coalition of Calvinist denominations, the ABCFM established the first American missions in India, China, Africa, Oceania, the Middle East, and many other places. It was America's largest missionary organization in the nineteenth century, and its influence was immense. Its missionaries established the first Western schools and hospitals in many parts of the world, and they successfully promoted women's rights and other ideals from the Enlightenment. They also transformed oral languages such as Zulu, Hawaiian, and Cherokee into written form, and they preserved many elements of premodern cultures (albeit not always intentionally).
The contributors to this book provide valuable insights on the work of the ABCFM (which exists today under a different name). Some of the contributors profile the lives of notable ABCFM missionaries, others focus on ideological shifts within the Board, and still others chronicle the Board's role in historic events, including the Opium Wars, the colonization of Hawai'i, and the Armenian Genocide. From reading this book, people will come to understand why the ABCFM is widely viewed as America's most historically significant missionary organization.
Table of Contents:
Illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The 1810 Formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
—Douglas K. Showalter
The Great Debate: The American Board and the Doctrine of Future Probation
—Sharon A. Taylor
Commercial Philanthropy: ABCFM Missionaries and the American Opium Trade
—Timothy Mason Roberts
American Board Schools in Turkey
—Dorothy Birge Keller and Robert S. Keller
Dr. Ruth A. Parmelee and the Changing Role of Near East Missionaries in Early Twentieth Century Turkey
—Virginia A. Metaxas
From Brimstone to the World's Fair: A Century of 'Modern Missions' as Seen through the American Hume Missionary Family in Bombay
—Alice C. Hunsberger
David Abeel, Missionary Wanderer in China and Southeast Asia; With Special Emphasis on His Visit with Walter Henry Medhurst in Batavia, January-June 1831
—Thomas G. Oey
Japanese Evangelists, American Board Missionaries, and Protestant Growth in Early Meiji Japan: A Case Study of the Annaka Kyôkai
—Hamish Ion
Nellie J. Arnott, Angola Mission Teacher, and the Culture of the ABCFM on Its Hundredth Anniversary
—Ann Ellis Pullen and Sarah Ruffing Robbins
The International Institute in Spain: Alice Gordon Gulick and Her Legacy
—Stephen K. Ault
Early Nineteenth Century Missionaries to Hawai'i and the Salary Dispute
—Paul T. Burlin
Titus Coan: 'Apostle to the Sandwich Islands'
—Donald Philip Corr
Christianity Builds a Nest in Hawai'i
—Regina Pfeiffer
'We will banish the polluted thing from our houses': Missionaries, Drinking, and Temperance in the Sandwich Islands
—Jennifer Fish Kashay
Domesticity Abroad: Work and Family in the Sandwich Islands Mission, 1820–1840
—Char Miller
Afterword For Heaven's Sake
—Char Miller
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