Reforming the world : the creation of America's moral empire / Ian Tyrrell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tyrrell, Ian R.

Series:

America in the world.

America in the world

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Imperialism--Moral and ethical aspects--History.

Imperialism.

Exceptionalism--United States--History.

Exceptionalism.

Evangelicalism--Political aspects--United States--History.

Evangelicalism.

Missionaries--United States--History.

Missionaries.

Transnationalism--History.

Transnationalism.

United States--Foreign relations.

United States.

United States--Territorial expansion.

United States--Moral conditions.

United States--Foreign relations--Moral and ethical aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (337 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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. Examining the cultural context of American expansionism from the 1870's to the 1920's, Tyrrell provides a new interpretation of Christian and evangelical missionary work, and he addresses America's use of "soft power." He describes evangelical reform's influence on American colonial and diplomatic policy, emphasizes the limits of that impact, and documents the often idiosyncratic personal histories, aspirations, and cultural heritage of moral reformers such as Margaret and Mary Leitch, Louis Klopsch, Clara Barton, and Ida Wells. The book illustrates that moral reform influenced the United States as much as it did the colonial and quasi-colonial peoples Americans came in contact with, and shaped the architecture of American dealings with the larger world of empires through to the era of Woodrow Wilson. Investigating the wide-reaching and diverse influence of evangelical reform movements, Reforming the World establishes how transnational organizing played a vital role in America's political and economic expansion.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I: Networks of Empire

Chapter 1. Webs of Communication

Chapter 2. Missionary Lives, Transnational Networks: The Misses Margaret and Mary Leitch

Part II: Origins of American Empire

Chapter 3. The Missionary Impulse

Chapter 4. The Matrix of Moral Reform

Chapter 5. Blood, Souls, and Power: American Humanitarianism Abroad in the 1890's

Part III: The Challenge of American Colonialism

Chapter 6. Reforming Colonialism

Chapter 7. Opium and the Fashioning of the American Moral Empire

Chapter 8. Ida Wells and Others: Radical Protest and the Networks of American Expansion

Part IV: The Era of World War I and the Wilsonian New World Order

Chapter 9. States of Faith: Missions and Morality in Government

Chapter 10. To Make a Dry World: The New World Order of Prohibition

Conclusion The Judgments of Heaven: Change and Continuity in Moral Reform

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612639555

9781282639553

1282639552

9781400836635

1400836638

OCLC:

656359070