About this item
Highlights
- In Word Across the Water, Tom Smith brings the histories of Hawai'i and the Philippines together to argue that US imperial ambitions towards these Pacific archipelagos were deeply intertwined with the work of American Protestant missionaries.
- About the Author: Tom Smith is the Keasbey Research Fellow in American Studies at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge.
- 336 Pages
- History, United States
- Series Name: United States in the World
Description
About the Book
"A comparative history of how American missionaries engaged with and interpreted the culture and society of Hawaii and the Philippines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries"-Book Synopsis
In Word Across the Water, Tom Smith brings the histories of Hawai'i and the Philippines together to argue that US imperial ambitions towards these Pacific archipelagos were deeply intertwined with the work of American Protestant missionaries. As self-styled interpreters of history, missionaries produced narratives to stoke interest in their cause, locating US imperial interventions and their own evangelistic projects within divinely ordained historical trajectories.
As missionaries worked in the shadow of their nation's empire, however, their religiously inflected historical narratives came to serve an alternative purpose. They emerged as a way for missionaries to negotiate their own status between the imperial and the local and to come to terms with the diverse spaces, peoples, and traditions of historical narration that they encountered across different island groups.
Word Across the Water encourages scholars of empire and religion alike to acknowledge both the pernicious nature of imperial claims over oceanic space underpinned by religious and historical arguments, and the fragility of those claims on the ground.
About the Author
Tom Smith is the Keasbey Research Fellow in American Studies at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. His work has previously been published in Diplomatic History, Historical Journal, and American Nineteenth Century History.