Missionaries in the “Era of Good Feelings”

On Tuesday, we called your attention to Sara Georgini’s series on the “Era of Good Feelings” at the U.S. Intellectual History Blog.

The series continues with a piece by Emily Conroy-Krutz of Michigan State University. Some of you may recall that Conroy-Krutz visited the Author’s Corner in September 2015 to discuss her book Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic.

In her post at the USIH blog she discusses “Missionary Intelligence and Americans’ Mental Map of the World” in the Era of Good Feelings.

Here is a taste:

Throughout its history, an important part of the foreign missions movement was communicating what they termed “missionary intelligence,” sharing information about the world with their domestic supporters who might never leave their home communities. By the 1830s, missionary promoters were convinced that it was only American ignorance about the world that prevented the mission movement from receiving the high levels of support that they felt it deserved. The solution to such a quandary was for the foreign mission movement to continue to educate the country about the world at large. Geographic, ethnographic, and political information about the world made up much of the published materials of the mission movement of this era.

This educational role reveals the ways that missionaries saw themselves as important mediators between the world and the nation. Like trade and commercial networks of the same era, the foreign mission movement connected the United States to a much larger world. If we want to understand the mental map of early 19^th century Americans, the foreign missions movement provides us with a helpful point of entry. And if we want to understand the diplomacy of the early republic, we ought to think more about these missionaries.

Read the entire post here.