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Examining the influential accounts of Westerners at the center of early US cultural development abroad, Johnson conceives a romance of free trade with China as a quest narrative of national accomplishment in a global marketplace. Drawing from a richly descriptive cross-cultural archive, the book presents key moments in early relations among the twenty-first century's superpowers through memoirs, biographies, epistolary journals, magazines, book reviews, fiction and poetry by Melville, Twain, Whitman, and others, travel narratives, and treaties, as well as maps and engraved illustrations. Paying close attention to figurative language, generic forms, and the social dynamics of print cultural production and circulation, Johnson shows how authors, editors, and printers appealed to multiple overlapping audiences in China, in the United States, and throughout the world.
King Kamehameha the Great had 30 wives. Ka'ahumanu (c.1768-1832) was his favorite. Descended from Oceanian voyagers, she grew up in a society completely isolated from the rest of the world, her life enmeshed in dynastic wars and constrained by an elaborate system of taboos. In 1778, she was shocked by the arrival of alien ships, followed by an influx of foreigners. In their wake came devastating epidemics. Seizing power after the King's death, Ka'ahumanu overturned those taboos and guided her nation through revolutionary change, crucial to the Hawaiian Islands' unification. Through sicknesses, romances, infidelities, murders, rebellions, pardons, travels, missionary work, and more, her story...
When tourists travel, they often seek the exotic. The farther they venture, the more unique the cultures they gaze upon, the greater the prestige accrued; cross-cultural contact is commonplace. Yet despite the obviously transnational character of the tourist experience, national borders define existing studies of tourism. Spanish, French, or German tourism is treated almost in isolation and there are only hints of a larger transnational impetus behind the creation of national tourism products. This volume tells a different story. Although modern tourism first evolved in Europe changes were never confined to national borders. The Grand Tour, the birthplace of modern tourism, was consummately ...
Imperial Maine and Hawai'i analyzes and elucidates some of the major themes and currents that shaped nineteenth-century American expansion in the Pacific. While the method used is a discussion of the lives and activities of individual Maine residents who were living in Hawai'i or dealing regularly with the archipelago, Paul T. Burlin's book is not a mere work of state history. Rather, the individual actors are employed as a proxy to discuss the larger issues involved in American imperialism.
In 1823, as the first American missionaries arrived in Hawai'i, the archipelago was experiencing a profound transformation in its rule, as oral law that had been maintained for hundreds of years was in the process of becoming codified anew through the medium of writing. The arrival of sailors in pursuit of the lucrative sandalwood trade obliged the ali'i (chiefs) of the islands to pronounce legal restrictions on foreigners' access to Hawaiian women. Assuming the new missionaries were the source of these rules, sailors attacked two mission stations, fracturing relations between merchants, missionaries, and sailors, while native rulers remained firmly in charge. In The Kingdom and the Republic...
Confronting Christianity explores the history of religious encounters between Christian missionaries and Thai Buddhists during the nineteenth century, a period of Western imperialism in Southeast Asia that fundamentally transformed Siamese society and religious institutions. From about 1830 onwards, discussions on religion became a central arena of conflict between rival regimes of knowledge in Thailand, confronting traditional Buddhist views on nature and man’s existence with the ideals and practices of science and rationalism coming from the West. Protestant missionaries, mostly from the United States, became important brokers of knowledge, as one of their strengths was the ability to of...
This book is a short introduction to one of the most remarkable transformations in the modern world that many people still do not know about. In 1900 more than 80 percent of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America and nearly all of the world's missionaries were sent out "from the West to the rest." In a dramatic turn of events Christianity experienced a decidedly "Southern shift" during the twentieth century. Today nearly 70 percent of the world's 2.5 billion Christians live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, while nearly half of all missionaries are being sent out into all the world from places like Brazil, Ethiopia, and South Korea. This book is intended to change the way readers think about the church and challenge the way the Western Christians engage in contemporary missions.
Full of colorful details and engrossing stories, Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles shows that the aspirations of individual Americans to be recognized as people worthy of others' respect was a driving force in the global extension of United States influence shortly after the nation's founding. Nancy Shoemaker contends that what she calls extraterritorial Americans constituted the vanguard of a vast, early US global expansion. Using as her site of historical investigation nineteenth-century Fiji, the "cannibal isles" of American popular culture, she uncovers stories of Americans looking for opportunities to rise in social status and enhance their sense of self. Prior to British colonizat...
A study of one imposter and his influential vision for British control over the nineteenth-century Pacific Ocean.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title (2022) A definitive history of evangelical Presbyterianism in America Reformed and Evangelical across Four Centuries tells the story of the Presbyterian church in the United States, beginning with its British foundations and extending to its present-day expression in multiple American Presbyterian denominations. This account emphasizes the role of the evangelical movement in shaping various Presbyterian bodies in America, especially in the twentieth century amid increasing departures from traditional Calvinism, historic orthodoxy, and a focus on biblical authority. Particular attention is also given to crucial elements of diversity in the Presbyterian story, with increasing numbers of African American, Latino/a, and Korean American Presbyterians—among others—in the twenty-first century. Overall, this book will be a bountiful resource to anyone curious about what it means to be Presbyterian in the multidimensional American context, as well as to anyone looking to understand this piece of the larger history of Christianity in the United States.