Weekend on cspan three. , historians discuss ideas that shape into national ideologies. Topics include 19th and 20th century and unilateralism and the impact of fear on u. S. Foreign policy. We are going to start our last panel for the day. Incredibly exciting. Im one to keep my remarks short. We have billion people who should be speaking. To borrow davids description of the panel. This is the panel on international ideologies. Ideas onng on these elite and grassroots levels that have shaped the United States. Unilateralism, internationalism. And the way it does Foreign Policy. The first people speaking today is an associate professor of history at Michigan State converting the world in the early american republic. Of is working on this study missionary diplomats. Tentatively titled Foreign Missions and Foreign Relations in 19th century america. Quick going to try to be since we have such a robust panel. At first i thought it was too silly for a conference on a serious topic. In the broadest scope over the second half of the 19th century. Thought i would start off by talking about how i came to look at this project. How it relates to my book project. One has to do with chronology and one has to do with sources. The peril of 19th century. To thes my story relate 20th century . We have so many 19th century views this weekend. My first book is in the early republic. Civilization and christianity are overlapping categories. When these missionaries and their supporters look out, they understood it in terms of hierarchy and season is him, focused on religion and culture and race. They expected major cultural and political change. Thats early 19th century. A different way missionaries are talking about the world and people. You can think about this in the fabulous books of melanie mcallister. Through both missionary there are major differences and really compelling similarities. One thing im trying to think about as i work on my new project is how to marry that shift from the mid19th century into the early 20th century. Some of the key points thinking about in this transition is thinking about the shifting ideas, the emphasis on the adoption of civilization, on cultural transformation. Easilys debt easily assumed superiority of the early 19th century also gets challenged in interesting writ interesting ways. Also the leadership of women. As we think about that, the 20th we look at the fundamentalist and modern split as the major explanation for why we have these different stories. Visionariesook at in general and we can have evangelicals nearly split in the 20th century, that is one of the big differences. That is happening earlier and much more slowly than that explanation let us to think about. They are both evident in the 19th century. With myis working along colleague with what my colleague calls christian how might we think about those changes in broader ways . Not just keeping it to that fundamentalist story, but Something Else . Multiple do with generations of missionary experience by the mid to century. And theirhildren children who have grown up in their entire lives. What difference does that make about civilization and politics. About changing transportation and print culture opportunities. Creates new avenues of conversation and competing imparted has to do with Major Political changes. Of cosmopolitanism. What interests me the most is having to do with expertise throughout the century. They work to evangelize the world but explain the world through the dissemination of what they call missionary intelligence. In my book project, im exploring the ways in which missionary intelligence work connects the Foreign Mission movement to american diplomacy in different points of the 19th century, how it allows certain american missionaries to be deployed by the department. How we might explain the ways in which the 19th century model is and not like the 20th century model. Jobhow we might do a better across this. Eyes asian this periodiz ation. As i was flipping through these questions, i was flipping through the harold. Ive found as i was building through, a new column introduced in the late 19th century, called four young people. The 17thom 1879 into century. Out for aon stands couple of reasons. Suddenly there are images, which do not exist before the introduction. All the illustrations are only in it is more visually engaging. It is also sectioned off. As you get to the journal i wanted to spend some time with that column thinking about Young Readers and how ideology was being packaged and what that might tell us about larger conversations about shifting chronology, how they are packaged in different ways. Some of the fun sources you get when you thing about children and the readers. With a discussion of an earlier example of children missionary literature. Entitled phlet letters on the condition of the heathen, which gives us a sense of the contents. He positions himself as an expert on india, the idea of missionary as experts start early. The topics are on that which he knows best, india and his people. He tells the children that he lives in india and he knows the people, so he can give them a view of what this pete this place and people are like. The letters emphasize their wretchedness and wickedness. He talks about the need of the gospel in india and he dwells deeply on scenes of violence. Come awayreaders to understanding how bad hinduism for childrenn and in particular, he wanted them to understand that as American Christians they had a duty to support the movement through sacrificial donations to missionary organizations. That is in keeping with a lot of the mid 19th century and early 19th century juvenile missionary literature. People holds onto some key points in that genre all introducing important changes, the emphasis of missionary of expert as expert continues. Readers were supposed to understand that by virtue of their long residencies in the places where they lived, their close conflict with ordinary people, their knowledge of the language that missionaries knew what they were talking about in ways that other american writers might not. The tone of the columns is quite new. Readers were understood to care about missions not because they have a religious duty to do so, but they could import learn important things. Theynts of missions learned where the best geography students. Andionaries had fabulous exciting adventures so you might read these columns not because your sunday School Teacher is making you, but because they have actual interest for you outside of that. Individual columns might focus on geographic information, there are some very elaborate maps. They might focus on a profile of a missionary. They might include ethnographic discussions of the residence. Often they were written by missionaries who were writing short letters to Young Readers trying to describe where they lived and why their work was important. The racism that we see in the earlier examples remains. Had a sort of relativism that reflected back on american norms in a new way. Where as with the previous generation, other than his own experience was strange and wicked, the new generation would still talk about the strangeness of foreigners, but would say and you know when i meet them i think i ams they think i am strange too. They would have that kind of reflection that the strangeness is in the eye of the beholder. Tot wouldve been news previous generations. One of the columns that i talk about that i find the most exciting is on the question of expertise is the one on rev land reverend deforest who writes the problems of idolatry in japan and then talks about how he is in fact collecting the idols that his new congregation members are giving up in order to send them to the United States for Museum Collections in the u. S. To teach americans about various ancient asian cultures, which speaks to this constant back and forth of saying idols are bad, you need to give them up in order to be civilized and because we are civilized we want to consume them and look at them in different ways. Thinking about the role of missionaries playing this intermediaries and experts is where this will connect to my larger book in looking at how adults are reacting to this. In the interest of not taking too much time so we can all talk, i want to hit the Big Questions about ideology that we might think through. This comes down to thinking about childrens literature as a source of these conversations. This will connect to what daniel will be talking about tomorrow. What does it mean to be looking at these alongside sources written for adults . How are they different and what might they suggest . There are two things i might. 2. Ways thatis, the childrens literature tells us about the ideology of adults and authors. Missionary childrens literature is explicitly didactic. It is supposed to be teaching anddren in the most simple distilled form possible. For christian parents and adults, who believe in the Mission Movement and are trying to give their children a religious education, these texts are supposed to be the foundation that will get interested and get the next generation to continue giving to the movements. If you do not hook them as kids, you will not have the continuity of the movement. Of the way that childrens literature becomes the way of trying to take complicated, conversations adults are having and put them in terms a child can understand, see a clarifying clarified version of the conversation adults are having. What is harder to get at, and much more interesting, is thinking about them as sources for childrens ideology and this long term, what is the effect of reading this as a child, how does that shape your worldview Going Forward . This is one of the things that speaks to that question of chronology, change over time and continuity. One of the things with that boat that i talked about, it is built i missionary childrens donations called the morningstar. By the time the article is written is written, it is the second one. The boat talks about how their parents when they were children had been contributing to build the first morningstar. And now you can contribute to this. In some of the letters that the boat rights, he talks about how hes getting old probably she. She is getting old and does not know how much longer she will last and there are talk about replacing her with a steam engine and whether she wants to be replaced by a steam engine or not. There is this multigenerational, you are building this one and maybe your children will be donating to future boats. There is an understanding of continuity across time. There is a letter where you have a missionary who talks about the book he read as a child that made him want to become a missionary and it had an illustration which was reprinted people. Oung he talks about the experience of reading the letter when he was a kid and seeing this illustration illustration and how it understood his vocation. And now you, child today, what are you going to do next . I do not know what the readers do next. This is what is tricky about that, thinking about the examples that we have of this on the Young Readers. Often times when we are looking at missionary texts, youre people at the effects of who read missionary text usually become missionaries. That was informative for me. As we have seen with marys study of the reception of the marrow more the memoir where you have 200 children being named after her afterthefact, 200 people do not go off to be missionaries necessarily, that enough parents name their children after her. Ofre is a larger readership these sources, adults and children. Is not thepeople only example. There are standalone magazines, books, and other columns. There is a large readership consuming this information. What we might think about is how does breezy reading these sorts of sources then shape your understanding of the world. We can all think about transformative books we read as children. To be thinking about texts that are so explicitly didactic and attempting to shape someones worldview and are positioning themselves as the expert vision is how you here understand japan, idiot india, africa, and how it relates to your life. What i would like to see you all help me think through is how to think about Young Readers, and how the experience of reading this will be shaping the next generation. Sources,about these juvenile literature, might help us think about longerterm changes and slow changes in these bigger questions about ideology, chronology, and how we get to an early eight 19thcentury story to a mid 20th century story. It is in that generational readership that we may think that we have new ways of narrating that. I will end that they are. [applause] moving quickly along, next we have a professor of history and director of american studies at indiana university, purdue university, in indianapolis. He directed the institute for american thought and serves as the head of the division of american culture. He is the author of five books. Thank you. [applause] right, so, let us try to put a timer on here. I have this project that i am im on that looks at not sure if i want to do it over the course of United States history as a whole, or use Something Like an example that i will talk about today, the challenge of the catholic peace pastoral as the fulcrum and talk about why it became an interesting moment to talk about just war. Im interested in how religion has been used to confirm or analyze, or provide substance to peoples understanding of america as identity. Andrew and chris have had a lot of influence on the way i think about this stuff and they have read stuff that i have written. Before this project, one book that attempted to do this was god and war that looked at religion after 1945 as that if america is alert known for killing, and it affects the world that is disproportionate than any other place, that all comes back to the United States itself. That was one of the ways that i try to think how civil religion affected is affected by americas tradition of war. In this case, what i am looking offshoot of the project, because after vietnam, if you are killing and dying for a war that goes badly it throws the United States into a theological crisis, similar to the civil war. It engendered a similar crisis. This vietnam, there was rejuvenation and renaissance in just war, which is ironic because they were not many wars in American History then were unjust than vietnam. Of course, what people were talking about was not so much the ethics of war that comes remoralize how to American Foreign policy or evaluate foreign in moral terms by using just war as a vehicle to talk about the moral nature of the nation. And so, what im i what i am trying to do is talk about how ideology can masquerade as religion. I am sure a lot of people go yes, there is a lot of similarities and crossover. That is where i think it gets confusing. When does religion fly into ideology or become a vehicle for ideologies of power and masculinity . In this chapter, i tried to talk about a group of leaders on religious rights that use this theory in a very particular way, and i think it has a cognizant and how the religious right used abortion to moralize domestic politics at the same time. Has not think that just war gotten a month as much detention attention about the debate about abortion. So why has it not been seen in these terms . You can tell me whether or not it should be. Littlesame time as religious right is starting to pick up on just war, you have this other set of american intellectuals writing in ethics that have become captured by just war theory. Calling grays is one of the colin grays is one of the figures. They are trying to justify American Foreign policy in moral terms and trying to demonstrate that it is a force for good. And they are desperate to find a theory that can allow them to do that. And just war becomes one of the ways they do this. Vietnam, begins after Foreign Policy is in shambles, american identity is linked to wars, theution of vietnam syndrome grows out of this idea. Those afflicted with this conflicts wondered whether the United States could ever win a war again, and in the right way. And, also be in the right. Among the roads to hopeful redemption was the idea that they could import just war to make the case that america would not only win wars, but when it the right way and be in the right. About, howng different sides did not debate the medieval term of just war. Of thew different sides political struggle, for the sole of American Foreign policy used alter therrogate to debate about the morality of Foreign Policy. Michael walter has a role to play in this. He becomes popular after vietnam. He writes a book called just and unjust wars in 1977. He says that the non vietnam is the book that this gets any sort of play. Says it is because america has this long tradition of intimate relationship with war. And people, for the most part throughout American History, war has been seen as a force for great change, it affirms something good about the nation. Rarely has it been seen as a way to critique what is wrong with some sort of essence of the United States. And so, walter writes that during vietnam, created a moral imperative to talk about the nation. It was the left that began to use just war, opening the door for the debate that would emerge after vietnam. And engendering a reaction that the way that the left was using just war. From the start of this renaissance of just war theory, the theory itself and the term itself was not used to evaluate the ethics or combat. One readsrs book, no the whole thing. He is clear about this. It finds its way into military handbooks but soldiers read it, not the people sending them off. That is key to understand, and why there think why think there is much more to do in connecting to what is happening in the world and what is happening with the religious right and religious left. In all of this, almo