Project

The Children of Missionaries and the American Encounter with the non-European World, 1930-1980

Program

ACLS Fellowship Program

Department

History

Abstract

This study concentrates on the adult careers of children of missionaries who made a mark on the life of the United States in several distinctive arenas, including academic foreign-area studies, the foreign service, the presentation of foreign cultures through fiction and the arts, journalism and the media, and the ecumenical movement with Protestantism. Prominent among their ranks were Edwin Reischauer, Robert Goheen, Paul Simon, John Birch, John S. Service, John Paton Davies, Jr., Pearl Buck, John Hersey, and Henry Luce. These products of a heavily ethnocentric and culturally imperialist project often (but not always) grew up to be liberalizers and de-provincializers.