ABOUT THIS BOOK

Competing Kingdoms rethinks the importance of women and religion within U.S. imperial culture from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In an era when the United States was emerging as a world power to challenge the hegemony of European imperial powers, American women missionaries strove to create a new Kingdom of God. They did much to shape a Protestant empire based on American values and institutions. This book examines American women’s activism in a broad transnational context. It offers a complex array of engagements with their efforts to provide rich intercultural histories about the global expansion of American culture and American Protestantism.

An international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, the contributors bring under-utilized evidence from U.S. and non-U.S. sources to bear on the study of American women missionaries abroad and at home. Focusing on women from several denominations, they build on the insights of postcolonial scholarship to incorporate the agency of the people among whom missionaries lived. They explore how people in China, the Congo Free State, Egypt, India, Japan, Ndebeleland (colonial Rhodesia), Ottoman Bulgaria, and the Philippines perceived, experienced, and negotiated American cultural expansion. They also consider missionary work among people within the United States who were constructed as foreign, including African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants. By presenting multiple cultural perspectives, this important collection challenges simplistic notions about missionary cultural imperialism, revealing the complexity of American missionary attitudes toward race and the ways that ideas of domesticity were reworked and appropriated in various settings. It expands the field of U.S. women’s history into the international arena, increases understanding of the global spread of American culture, and offers new concepts for analyzing the history of American empire.

Contributors: Beth Baron, Betty Bergland, Mary Kupiec Cayton, Derek Chang, Sue Gronewold, Jane Hunter, Sylvia Jacobs, Susan Haskell Khan, Rui Kohiyama, Laura Prieto, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Mary Renda, Connie A. Shemo, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Ian Tyrrell, Wendy Urban-Mead

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Barbara Reeves-Ellington is Associate Professor of History at Siena College in Loudonville, New York.

Kathryn Kish Sklar is Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

Connie A. Shemo is Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh.

REVIEWS

“In Competing Kingdoms, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo bring together a group of emerging and established historians in an innovative project of bringing insights from American mission women’s history into the framework of American cultural imperialism. . . . This collection offers fertile directions for scholars concerned with American imperialism and more generally with the thorny questions of gender, missions, and empires. We can look forward to many of these historians producing book-length accounts where they can develop their research findings more fully. The editors are to be congratulated.” - Patricia Grimshaw, Journal of Church and State

“Competing Kingdoms presents fresh and wide-ranging scholarship on gender and mission, linking it to American cultural expansionism (1812-1960).” - Maina Chawla Singh, International Bulletin of Missionary Research

“[A]n important and welcome collection of essays. . . . The attempt to connect gender and foreign relations succeeds thanks to the breadth of scholarship in this volume and the diverse but focused essays that comprise it. . . . [A] groundbreaking contribution to US history.” - Johanna Selles, Missiology

“Competing Kingdoms achieves through the inclusion of many authors what few have been able to achieve singly: the internationalization of American women’s history. It focuses on a group of culture agents who were at the avant-garde of America’s emergence into global influence: women missionaries.”—Ann Braude, author of Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion

“This rich, diverse collection of essays illuminates women’s pivotal role in the Protestant missions that were at the center of Americans’ interactions with Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in the nineteenth century and early twentieth. Throughout the pieces, readers witness the women that made missions possible—not only as missionaries, but also as sponsors and audiences—navigating the tensions and intersections between ideals and practices of spiritual equality and those of patriarchy, empire, and race, enlisting and challenging gendered conventions in the process. This volume will prove an indispensable guide in the effort to bring gender analysis, religious culture, and women’s agency into an internationalized historiography of the United States.”—Paul A. Kramer, author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines

“Competing Kingdoms reveals the complex and unpredictable results of the missionary enterprise, showing how the work of American women simultaneously constructed and destabilized gender, cultural, and racial hierarchies, with significant results for sending and receiving cultures alike. The tensions suggested in the volume’s title play out in fascinating detail in its pages.”

-- Andrew Witmer Journal of American History

“Competing Kingdoms presents fresh and wide-ranging scholarship on gender and mission, linking it to American cultural expansionism (1812–1960).”

-- Maina Chawla Singh International Bulletin of Missionary Research

“[A]n important and welcome collection of essays. . . . The attempt to connect gender and foreign relations succeeds thanks to the breadth of scholarship in this volume and the diverse but focused essays that comprise it. . . . [A] groundbreaking contribution to US history.”

-- Johanna Selles Missiology

“In Competing Kingdoms, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo bring together a group of emerging and established historians in an innovative project of bringing insights from American mission women’s history into the framework of American cultural imperialism. . . . This collection offers fertile directions for scholars concerned with American imperialism and more generally with the thorny questions of gender, missions, and empires. We can look forward to many of these historians producing book-length accounts where they can develop their research findings more fully. The editors are to be congratulated.”

-- Patricia Grimshaw Journal of Church and State

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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