Massacre in Shansi - Hardcover

Brandt, Nat

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0815602820 ISBN 13: 9780815602828

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, 1994

Synopsis

This text tells the tragic story of the 18 missionaries from Oberlin College, Ohio, and the Chinese Christians, who were all killed during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Caught up in a clash of cultures, the missionaries were self-righteous and offensive symbols of Western imperialism.

About this title

From the Back Cover

With his latest book, prize-winning, popular historian Nat Brandt turns his eye to a little-known group of Midwest missionaries who gave their lives for their religious beliefs. Brandt's careful research uncovers the life, attitudes, and Christianity of the Oberlin College missionaries from the late 1880s leading up to their deaths in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion in China. The eighteen missionaries who traveled to Shansi were dedicated, pious, hard-working clerics. Ernest Atwater, the young minister Francis Ward Davis and his wife Lydia, Charles Wesley Price and his family, and Susan Rowena Bird, to name a few, were all spurred by their strong beliefs, but they were also quite ignorant of other countries and cultures. Often having to live in disease-ravished areas of China and under harsh conditions, they were repulsed by the native lifestyle and saw further need to change it. Brandt presents finely wrought portraits of these people, detailing the lives of both the missionaries and their converts, their experiences in the interior province of Shansi, and their struggle in trying to spread Christianity among people whose language they could not speak and whose traditions and customs they did not understand. Brandt's gripping narrative brings to light a penetrating and sincere study of the "Oberlin Band" of Protestant missionaries and captures the essence of their daily life. Considered in a fair and honest context, the descriptions are often taken directly from personal correspondence and journals. This tragic story of the clash between two cultures is primarily the story of the missionaries - six men, seven women, five children. Their names appear on bronze tablets on the onlymonument in America ever erected to individuals who died in that uprising, the Memorial Arch on the campus of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.

About the Author

Nat Brandt is a veteran journalist who began his career with CBS News as a senior newswriter, then turned to print journalism. He was a reporter on several newspapers in Connecticut and New Jersey before joining The New York Times as an editor, working primarily on the National News Desk. Subsequently, he was Man-aging Editor of American Heritage magazine and Editor-in-Chief of Publishers Weekly. He is a past president of the nation's oldest journalists' organization, the Society of the Silurians. A native of New York City, Brandt majored in history at the University of Rochester and was a member of the school's history honor society, the Morey Club. He has written many articles dealing with American history--among them, stories about Ander-sonville prison, Sergeant York, the Blizzard of '88 and the Pledge of Allegiance. He has been a freelance author since 1980, and has taught as an adjunct professor of journalism at the Graduate Schoo

About this edition

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0815602820
• ISBN 13: 9780815602828
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 360