Foreign Missionaries & American Diplomacy in the 19th Century

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. On a hot Saturday afternoon in August, 1806, five students at Williams College in Massachusetts were praying in a grove as they did twice a week. On this particular day, a fierce thunderstorm drove them out of the grove to take shelter under a haystack. As they later told the story, it was under that haystack, that 23 year old Samuel J. Mills Jr. proposed that they share the gospel in Asia and throughout the world. That haystack prayer meeting was the inspiration for the founding of the Congregationalist American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, ABCFM, in 1810. Two years later, the first ABCFM mission headed to India. Of the eight missionaries who set off to what was then part of the British Empire, three were women. In 1812, of course, the United States was at war with Britain, and those American missionaries were promptly arrested, as they had no right to proselytize in India. Undaunted, the ABCFM continued to send missionaries around the world, over the next three decades, sponsoring missions to China, Singapore, Greece, Turkey, the Sandwich Islands or what we now call Hawaii, Western and Southern Africa and many other locales. It wasn't just the ABCFM. Soon, other Protestant denominations had their own missionary societies. In the early 19th century, the ABCFM considered missions to Indigenous nations in North America to be within its scope of foreign missions. It was in this context that the corresponding secretary of the organization, Jeremiah Evarts, in 1825, published a series of anonymous essays to argue against the removal of the Native Americans from their Native lands. The ABC FM too, was closely involved in two Supreme Court cases, dealing with the removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia. Despite the support of the missionaries, the Cherokee Nation lost Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, and was forced on the deadly march west to Oklahoma, known as the Trail of Tears. Some of the missionaries accompanied them. It wasn't just within the borders of the United States that missionaries involved themselves in political and legal affairs, and they did so sometimes, in places where the United States did not yet have an official diplomatic presence. The United States Department of State was created by Congress in 1789, as the first federal agency. President George Washington appointed Thomas Jefferson as his first Secretary of State. As crucial as this executive department was to the functioning of a brand new country though, it was quite small, consisting of the secretary, a few clerks and a part time translator. By 1830, nearly two decades after the ABCFM had begun sending missionaries around the world, the Department of State had a mere 23 employees within the US, and another 153 stationed across the globe, leaving many regions without any US officials. With the small global footprint of the State Department, missionaries played an important role, providing vital intelligence, as they wrote in detail and lectured about their experiences in places like China, India, and the Sandwich Islands. Because they were seen as experts on the places they had served, missionaries were sometimes tapped by the US government for official work as translators, and advisors, and sometimes even diplomatic officials. Samuel Wells Williams, for instance, spent decades in China, first taking charge of the ABCFM printing press there when he was just 21 years old, in 1833. At the time, there was only one other American missionary in China, Elijah Bridgman, who was working on books of Chinese lexicography that Williams assisted with. By 1848, Williams was the editor of the Chinese Repository, an English language periodical published in China, for which Williams contributed over 100 articles. Williams reached an even larger audience with the publication of his book, "The Middle Kingdom: a Survey of the Geography, Government, Education, Social Life, Arts, Religion, etc, of the Chinese Empire and Its Inhabitants," which helped introduce the eager American public to Chinese culture. Williams didn't just contribute to American knowledge of China, however. He also worked for the US government as an interpreter on Commodore Perry's 1853 expedition to Japan, as Secretary of the United States delegation to China starting in 1855, and as charge d'affaires for the US in Beijing from 1860 to 1876. As the official US presence grew throughout the world, the relationship between missionaries and the State Department became more complicated. Missionaries often demanded consular presence and assistance, in places that may otherwise not have been a high priority for the US government. Sometimes too, the religious work of missionaries was not welcomed in the host country, where the practice of Christianity or at least Christian proselytization could be illegal. The US government was often placed in the challenging position of trying to assist American citizens, while also respecting local laws, leading the State Department to term these and related issues, as "missionary troubles." The United States still has a strong foreign missionary tradition. As of 2010, the Director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, estimated that the United States sent 127,000 of the world's missionaries abroad, over a quarter of the total population of foreign missionaries, and almost four times as many as the next most popular sending country, Brazil. For its part, the United States State Department has grown tremendously since its formation, now employing around 13,000 members of the Foreign Service, 11,000 civil service employees, and 45,000 local staff, at over 270 diplomatic missions. Joining me now is Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz, Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University and the author of, "Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and 19th Century American Foreign Relations."

Hi, Emily, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz  10:13  
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. 

Kelly  10:15  
Yes, I'm thrilled to be speaking with you. So I want to hear a little bit about how this is, I believe your second book, so how you got into writing this book and developing this topic. 

Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz  10:25  
Absolutely. Yeah. My first book is on a somewhat related topic. It's "Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic," that was our subtitle, and that looked at Protestant missionaries and ideas about empire, in about the 18 teens to the 1840s. And so this book really did emerge out of conversations I had after "Christian Imperialism" came out, and was talking to folks, particularly in through the world of history, foreign relations, who were interested in the book, and I got a couple of questions that were like, "Okay, so if you see these missionaries who have ideas about empire, who are sort of talking amongst themselves about imperialism, and are going out into these imperial spaces, you know, what does that matter for US policy? Like, does that actually have any effect? Or is this just a story about these missionaries off in the corner?" And so I sort of went from there, because I was like, yeah, they had, they did make a difference. And it made a difference in a couple of different ways. And I think telling a long story over the course of so this book goes from the 18 teens to, to the 1920s, to sort of look at the way that this Protestant mission movement grew up alongside the sort of development, development of the State Department and American diplomatic infrastructure, one of the things that I found was that missionaries and diplomats had a slightly different geographic footprint. And so the places where missionaries were going, were a little bit different than where early American diplomats really got excited about. And this really positioned missionaries to have have a lot of influence. And so as I got deeper into the research, I was finding that missionaries are, they're all over the place, but slightly differently than the government. And so that creates these really interesting relationships where they actually have a pretty big impact on 19th century policy. And I think going into the 20th century, sort of the how Americans think about the world, the places they care about, that missionaries can tell people where they should care about and they're telling the public, and they're also telling government officials in really important ways.

Kelly  12:38  
Yeah, including up to presidents. So let's talk a little bit about how you tackle this kind of research, right? This is, as you said, over a century worth of history. It's global, literally all over the world. So how do you figure out how did you figure out you know, where to go looking for what sorts of materials you were thinking about, as you were putting this all together? 

Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz  13:02  
Yeah, it was, I mean, I knew I wanted to be sure to get both sort of two sides of the story, a missionary side and a government side. What you won't see much of here and largely due to my own inability to do the languages and in part because I think just the way I structured the argument is I don't have much sort of foreign language sources from the people the missionaries are interacting with. It's this is really a missionary to government story, to US government story. So I used a lot of archives from both published and unpublished, from missionary organizations. And, so almost a plug, Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia is one of the best places to research, Houghton Library, Union Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity School, places like that. And then I also was in the National Archives and working with the Foreign Relations of the US Series. You know, part of the research story for this book, too, is that I was doing the research and the writing during COVID. And so would not have been able to do it without Hathi Trust and digitization of some presidential papers and things like that, and a friend working, Sara Georgini, working at the John Quincy Adams, working at Mass historical study that helped me sort of get through the John Quincy Adams materials I needed to see. So yeah, it was really trying to balance those, those two different things. And missionaries, for better and for worse, are incredibly prolific writers. And so there was one of the big themes that came out in the book was missionaries creating what they called missionary intelligence, all these documents that are telling the Americans about the world. And a lot of that is has been published and is online. So if you have a free afternoon and want to sort of go down some Hathi Trust rabbit holes, there are some fantastic missionary texts that I had a lot of fun exploring for this book. 

Kelly  14:48  
Yeah, I don't know if everyone would want to do that. But I think listeners of this podcast might. Niche interest. One of the things that happens of course, is the the changing role of the US in the world in this time period, you're looking at, going from a very, very small footprint globally to the US by the end of World War I being everywhere across the globe, and the State Department being, you know, a teeny tiny little thing to being much, much bigger. So could you talk a little bit about how that affects this story that you're telling, the relationship between missionaries and the US government, how it shifts as really as the US government itself is changing? 

Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz  15:32  
Yeah, over the course of the century, what we see happening is the, as you say, the government is sort of increasing its footprint and going many more places. And so were the missionaries. And sometimes the government is following the missionaries. And sometimes missionaries are following the government. And so one of the things that was really exciting to dig into more deeply here was the ways that missionaries are forcing questions about what citizenship means. And so where does the State Department need to go? Largely because they keep on getting into trouble. So there's this great story from the 1830s in Hawaii, where a French captain is there and is basically refuses to acknowledge that the missionaries there are American citizens. And so he will not sort of extend them the courtesy that he's going to extend to the other Americans in Hawaii at that time. And, you know, understandably, that leads them to freak out a little bit and this question of, well, are we citizens or not? And what can we expect from our government? And it takes a while to get an answer, because this is sort of, they're on the outer edges of where government officials really are. There's a consul there, but at that time, it's not a sympathetic consul. And so they end up working for the navy to get information back from the State Department in Washington, who says, "Yes, you are citizens, and you are entitled to this protection." Important point, one of the things that we see them as it as a going to places where, you know, they can't reach a consul really easily or where the consuls are, if they're far away, or they're unsympathetic, we see missionaries writing and demanding that the government show up for them, and that they sort of increase their reach, increase their footprint. We see missionaries, trying to figure out how to sort of put this delicately making generous interpretations of treaty law in places like China and going beyond where the US government really wants them to go, and forcing the hand of the government in a lot of these cases. So I talk about this dynamic in two ways in the book. I've got sort of back to back chapters, one is titled, "Victims," and it's looking at sort of when missionaries call on the government because they are being attacked for various reasons. You know, sometimes we have a couple of examples of missionaries who were murdered, sometimes, you know, having nothing to do with their evangelistic work or they're wrong place, wrong time kind of things. And then the next chapter is, "Troublemakers," looking at when missionaries are indeed bending the rules and breaking the rules and demanding a government response. And what the missionaries would say over and over again is, "We are American citizens who are out in the world on legitimate business. And so we need, the government needs to show up for us where where we are going." But one of the more powerful stories, and this ends up being a kind of complicated one where there's missionaries who are in in the Carolina Islands, when that was a Spanish colony. And we see this back and forth, ultimately, when one of the missionaries gets gets arrested, and then there's a sort of an anti colonial uprising that the missionaries get get caught up in sort of letters between Spain, and Washington and Manila, and these islands, as everyone is trying to figure out, you know, "How did the missionaries do what what the governor on this island is saying they did they not? What kinds of rights do they have?" and there's no consul. The consul  has been appointed, but is not yet there. And so we see through these increasingly frantic letters from missionaries who aren't, you know, make him come faster, we really need his help. And that kind of thing happens, you know, fairly regularly, which means that we have missionaries sort of calling on the government. I wouldn't go so far as to say that missionaries are the reason that the US state is expanding its reach full stop over the course of the century, but it is absolutely they are pulling the government into places where, you know, the diplomatic interests were not particularly high until the missionaries show up. And then suddenly, you have a significant American presence in these places. And now the US government has to care about them.

So it was somewhat surprising to me how often there were women who were acting as missionaries, sometimes even single women by themselves in ways that you just wouldn't see with the US government at the time periods that you're looking at often. So could you talk a little bit about that, you know, how how that works, why these women had the freedom to go out and be missionaries, and so how that ends up playing out as people are trying to determine, you know, as the government, US government is saying, like, "Do we need to help or not?" And sometimes it matters that they're these are women who are in trouble.

Absolutely. And I love that you picked up on that. I was worried that it didn't come across enough in the book. So that's great. Yes, after the Civil War, and going forward, I think it might still be true today, actually, that the majority of missionaries, American missionaries overseas are women. They are absolutely numerically sort of dominating American missionary space. But, that said, they are not the folks who the US government is really talking to, or sort of sees itself as partnering with in some of these spaces, right? The women are not going to be the ones who are working as consuls. They're not going to be the ones who are working as interpreters and aides to the delegations and things like that. But they are there, and they are writing and they are shaping that missionary intelligence very heavily. And as you said, sometimes they are getting into trouble. And, you know, to sort of why are they there in the first place, is that from the very beginning of the mission movement, women are American women are really excited about this possibility. I have an article in another volume that's coming out soon, that looks at women's letters to apply to be missionaries, in the very early 19th century, before single women were sent out overseas. And it was so striking to me how many women, were very excited about this movement, excited about it for all the reasons you might expect. It's adventure and gives them a lot of sort of a different kind of freedom than they have in the US, but also that they see it as an outgrowth of sort of their expected roles of being a work like teaching and nursing and things like that are very much part of missionary work. So they're able to sort of take the their expected role as sort of moral leaders into this, this missionary space. And so after the Civil War, we see the creation of missionary boards that are specifically sending out women, and only women and single women who are, you know, setting up schools or setting up hospitals. There are women doctors going out, women nurses, and it's just, there's there's a ton of them. And I could go on, at great length about sort of the kinds of work they're doing, and the ways that it sort of shifts the idea from the early 19th century to the later 19th century. But I'll sort of try to keep myself focused on this question of sort of what happens with the government when they when they come into trouble, because it is, it sometimes really makes a difference when the people who are harmed are women. So one of the that example I was mentioned before in the Carolina Islands, what is really remarkable and is an important part of the the diplomatic debate, or discussion, I should say, across between Washington and Manila, is that at the time of one of the attacks on missionary property, as the government on the island is saying that, you know, these missionaries are sort of fomenting this anti colonial uprising, and they need to be punished, the only missionaries on the island were women. And so the American diplomats are saying, that is ridiculous, how can you possibly say that these missionaries were involved because they were women, and you see all this gendered language there, about, you know, how they couldn't possibly had anything to do these major political issues. And therefore, you know, Spain needs to kind of intervene here and protect these poor women who need need the help and are just trying to do good in the world, right. There's another great example where it's, I think, a Teddy Roosevelt's letter, where there's an American woman missionary, who is kidnapped and held for ransom, and he has this sort of wonderful, he's incredibly frustrated at the entire situation, but it's particularly frustrated that it's a woman, because, you know, he wants to just kind of leave it that, you know, missionaries are making the choice to go out into places where they're not wanted and to do stuff that annoys the people around them, which, you know, absolutely, they are doing, and that's the question that the government has to keep on facing over the course of the 19th century. You know, what do you do with these people who are going out and trying to create controversy and create dramatic cultural change? And so Roosevelt, right wants to just say, you know, leave them to it, it's, you know, they got themselves into it, except, you know, here we have this woman who is, is the one in trouble, and that means that they have to intervene, and they have to protect her. You know, and again, she's able to kind of hide her politics in really interesting ways. And so that's something I'm hoping to dig into more in sort of my next book a little bit as think about sort of the politics of some of these women, because, you know, I think there's a lot more there than we know about what the influence these women had on on some of these political conversations.

Kelly  24:51  
So there's a lot of interesting discussion in this book about who is American, who is Christian, you know, especially I think the what really drives that home is when the US suddenly has the Philippines as a territory. And there's this idea of well, is this a foreign mission? Is this somehow a home mission? Because the Philippines is part of the United States now. And really interestingly, because most of the missionaries you're looking at are Protestant is this question of, "Should we be converting people? Are we converting people who are Catholic, they are Christian already, you know, but they are not the kind of Christian that these missionaries want them to be?" So could you talk a little bit about that? And these these weird, nuanced discussions that ended up happening because of this?

Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz  25:42  
Oh, absolutely. The Philippines case is so incredibly key for thinking about how sort of religion plays into an American diplomacy, more generally, colonial rule and empire. And there's, I should say, you know, my work in in that the chapter that looks at this really closely is very influenced by the work of Karine Walther and Tisa Wenger, diplomatic historian and Religious Studies scholar who have both also talked about some of these dynamics, you know. What is, what happens in in the Philippines after the War of 1898, the US, right claims claims the Philippines as its colonies, and President McKinley, you know, you know, later reflects, it's, you know, this this apocryphal story about, you know, getting on his knees in the White House and praying to God, you know what to do. And, you know, being reassured that what he needs to do is to go into the Philippines, to keep them, to Christianize them, to civilize them, and prepare them for a future democratic self government, and missionaries love this. Protestant missionaries are so incredibly excited. What's really interesting about this moment, right, is that if sort of the missionaries have been kind of pulling the government with them in a lot of places, this is a place where missionaries are following in the footsteps of the US government, right, the government gets there first. And they are so excited to have the opportunity. Pretty quickly, all kinds of Protestant missionary organizations send out their missionaries to go there, they actually have to the meet to, to sort of divvy up the islands and who's gonna go where, and they are very much sort of in that mindset that this is a Catholicism is not, is not the kind of Christianity that they want. And American Catholics are really concerned about this correctly. And this is sort of on the heels of many years of missionaries talking in really trying to make religious freedom into a centerpiece of American diplomacy and American foreign policy. And they understand and they have long understood religious freedom in an international context to mean the freedom for them to proselytize. And the freedom for missionaries, for Protestant missionaries to be able to be, you know, wherever they want, and seeking out converts. And so that's going to come, you know, create some real controversy in the Philippines case, and missionaries are, there's sort of interesting and complicated dynamic, where they're both welcomed and kind of tried to have a rein on them for how active they get, because, you know, we have, you know, Taft, who, you know, will later be president, but at this point is governor of the Philippines, you know, he's there, you're really trying to navigate this very complicated political and religious and sort of colonial context, he, you know, goes to the Vatican. One of the things that the American, you know, that what the governor of US government wants to do is just identify that the, what they understand to be a real problem of Catholicism in the Philippines is not Catholicism as such, but the Spanish Catholic Catholicism. And so what we see sort of American Catholics and the government really trying to do is replace Spanish friars, with an American American priests, things like this, and change and trying to kind of separate with what they identify as sort of the problem there was it was too close relationship between church and state in the Spanish era, and they're going to separate those things. And so religion, church and state are going to be separate. And that's going to be how we have religious freedom in the Philippines, in this period of American rule, and Protestant missionaries are, you know, they're incredibly excited. So it's a very, it's a complicated dynamic, for sure. And one of my favorite moments, and I think you mentioned is sort of this question of, you know, is this a home mission or foreign mission? Throughout the 19th century missionary organizations divided between foreign missions and and home missions, home missions, usually working with immigrant populations, sometimes with frontier populations, sometimes with Native Americans. Native Americans themselves get sort of switched in their categorization over the course of the century. But there's this meeting of I think it's the Methodists, who are trying to decide whether their foreign Mission Board can send someone to the Philippines or is this properly as a as a colonial space? Is it is it foreign or is home? And there's this great line in the annual report where they decide it is foreign. And whatever the US government wants to say about this space, it is not home, it is foreign. And what's so important about that, right is it draws our attention to the fact that this is about race. You know, this, the all of these ideas about religion and about sort of political communities and sort of thing, what they are sort of the centrality of racial categories to all of that. And so Kathryn Gin Lum's recent book, "Heathen" is really great on this point as well, thinking about the ways that religious and racial categories work together. And we see that so so strongly, in this missionary case, in the Philippines, as you have a lot of missionaries coming out and both incredibly excited, they can take advantage of the presence of the American empire there, and yet very clear, right that this colonial space is not, it is not home, it is not the same. And it needs their their help to make it better in their eyes.

Kelly  31:03  
You mentioned earlier that when the missionaries are asking the US government for help or intervention in various places, I you know, they make the argument that they are US citizens, they're on, you know, business, essentially. And I think that's one of the pieces that becomes so interesting, too, is that they're not just out there proselytizing. They're not just out there, like giving bibles to people. They are out in the world, giving humanitarian aid, building hospitals, building schools, working as translators, doing all sorts of other things, in the name of religion, you know, for the goal of spreading religion, and yet accomplishing these other things. So can you talk about how that complicates things for the US government and the ways that they of course want to help US citizens? Who are these US citizens? What are they doing, but they're doing good things? You know, what? How of that all of that plays together?

Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz  31:57  
Absolutely? Yeah, I mean, I think the broad umbrella of missionary work works out great for the US government here, because these missionaries are in a lot of the work they're doing, particularly in institution building, they are making the US look good and look like you were really good force in the world. So they are indeed they're setting up schools, the it's one of the first things that missionaries do, they set up schools at both kind of the way they think about today is with the elementary school level, but all the way up through colleges and universities, some of which still exist in different forms. They set up medical schools, they set up hospitals, all over the place, they have doctors who travel, they have, and they they're making a real difference. Now, as they do so I should say, right? The doctors are in particular can be very dismissive of any local medical practices that exist, right. But they, you know, hospitals are good, doctors are good. This is all good things to have in places. And so for, you know, the government is really happy to talk about the secular work that the missions do. And I should say, publishing, book publishing is a huge part of this, too, where mission presses around the world will be publishing translated scriptures and things like this, but also all kinds of other books and school books and things like that. And so, in and the Ottoman Empire, in particular, this gets really complicated and missionaries are going to get, they're going to be calling on the government to help them sort of navigate this because they are, as they describe themselves, the largest booksellers in the region. And, and they're finding all these books that they are, and they're contesting that these are not, you know, some of these are religious titles, but some of them are being mischaracterized as religious titles by the Ottomans. And the American missionaries saying these are these are schoolbooks. I, you know, I would be more sympathetic to the Ottoman if you hear that there's, the religion is kind of coming through in a lot of those, those more, you know, so called neutral or secular texts. So it's really complicated. And it's asking the government, the US government to get involved in sort of parsing that question of what is and what isn't religious? And, you know, we're talking about a missionary hospital, is that a secular space? Or is that a religious space? And what's really helpful for, you know, sort of pay attention, the 19th century context here is that, you know, missionaries as they set up schools, as they set up hospitals, they think about them as both providing humanitarian and sort of civilizing care, but also as creating places where they will get a captive audience. And so, you know, missionary doctors will write prescriptions on paper that is, you know, on the back has scripture written. They will hire what are called Bible women to be in the waiting rooms. And these were local women, who were Christians who could basically sort of pray aloud and sort of lead in religious teachings in the waiting room and also come visit you while you were healing in your bed, and sometimes come follow up to visit you in your home. And so there is a there's a, I think what a lot of you know, modern readers sort of see as a blurriness and a confusion of these categories that for 19th century Americans, I think mostly it was more legible that the sort of porousness of these categories between what was secular and what was religious, there was there was no hard and fast rule. And so that does indeed get really complicated for the government when it is trying to figure out when when are the missionaries acting as, as doctors or as educators? When are they acting as evangelists? And you know, does it matter in terms of whether the government has to has to come in and help them out? 

Kelly  35:49  
I think even in 21st century United States, we haven't totally figured out all those lines. So you know, it's pretty understandable. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this adorable story of your daughter, and the drawing that she made for the cover of the book when you were first starting it?

Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz  36:05  
Yeah, so, oh gosh, my daughter was probably six when I was starting, yeah, five or six when I was starting this book. And she, so she was just starting to understand what kinds of things they were done. And she was, was helping me one afternoon and decided to draw me the cover. And so I have it hanging on my my office wall at work as she drew. So what is it about? Well, it's about, you know, missionaries who go around the world, you know, trying to get other people to become Christians and how they relate to the government. And so she drew me a, a world that looks like a big chocolate chip cookie, with a person standing on top of it. Who, "Would you like to be a Christian?" is coming out of their mouth. And she said, "Well, where do they go?" And I said, "Well, they go all over the place." And so she said, "Okay, well, let's call it, 'The Around the World Adventures.'" And on the bottom, it's by Emily. And Lizzie. So let's look it's from is from her as well, although she is. That was a long time ago, which is I when she comes into my office now, which was what does that say? What did I write there? But yeah, she was actually giving me a pep talk the other day, when I was saying I was, you know, a little nervous, the books coming out? How are people? Are people gonna like it or not? She said, Mom, of course, they're gonna like it, because why would they buy it if they weren't gonna like it? And so, you know, I hope that that is the attitude that everyone looks with, as as it goes forward. I was like, you know, sometimes, like, you have books you don't like, and she goes, Well, yeah, but here's this really specific. I hope it's not, I hope, generally interesting to all sorts of folks, because I think it does tell a pretty big story about so the long history of religion and politics, which hopefully has a broader audience than my daughter imagines.

Kelly  37:55  
So I slightly off topic, but I know you're a knitter. And I can't resist asking questions about knitting. So I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about the the kinds of stuff that you like to knit. And you know, if you see any relationship between your knitting and your scholarship, or it's just totally a like, this is how I get my brain reset.

Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz  38:13  
Oh, are you a knitter as well?

Kelly  38:15  
I am, yes, every day.

Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz  38:17  
Okay, right. So oh, I could talk about this for a long time. I have been knitting for 20 something years now. And so at this point, it is just a huge part of my life. And I knit when, there are projects I can knit while I'm reading, and while I'm grading and certainly when I'm in meetings, and so I have my project right here that the new take into my department meeting later this afternoon. So that I behaved myself when I'm in that meeting. And, you know, I think that there's a couple of things that being a knitter has done to really influence my scholarship, and one is that it has helped me to sort of embrace starting something new, and knowing that it might take me a while to figure out what I'm doing. But that I will figure it out. And to kind of trust the process, which, you know, especially for the kind of work I do, where I'm in all kinds of different historiographies and, you know, having to go knock on doors of colleagues and say, you know, I'm writing a chapter on on Congo, you know, what should I read? That's not just what American is writing, you know, what, how do I approach this and how do I you know, what should I read if I'm writing on the Boxer Uprising? And so I think that sort of knitting is a nice way of practicing every single day, figuring something new out, and sometimes things go wrong, and you can fix them. One of my writing mantras, right is that writing is revising. And that we I'm big fan of Anne Lamott's approach to shitty rough drafts and multiple revisions and things like that. And, you know, that's also how I approach my knitting life right, where, you know, just this week I tore out the sleeves of a sweater I just finished because they were not quite right and reknit them, and I like it so much more now. And it's a nice, you know, reminder again and again that like sometimes it's gonna really hurt to have to sort of stop and, you know, toss the draft and cut out those lines, but you're gonna be so much happier in the end. And I think also what I like about it, as someone who enjoys feeling like I've made progress on something is that so much of historical work like it, there's a long time when you are, you know, sitting with your documents, and it, it's hard to sort of see anything coming out of it. And so it's just nice to kind of have a nice little boost that, you know, okay, I, you know, was sitting here reading this, and, you know, my eyes feel like they're gonna fall out of my head, from, you know, staring at the microfilm for this long. But look, I have, you know, I got a couple of inches on on this project. I was doing it. And look, I can, you know, measure, you can measure time that way, in a way that I think is really great. But yeah, I mean, is that is the same for you, or is it?

Kelly  40:57  
Yeah, you know, so much of my job involves a lot of a lot of things on a computer, right? That never become physical products, lots of emails and moving electronic files around and editing sound waves and stuff. And so having something that's tangible, is so important. And I think, you know, I can feel like my blood pressure lowering when I pick up my needles and start knitting and I you know, I find that really valuable.

Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz  41:21  
Oh, absolutely. Just having something tactile just makes, oh, and color. Yeah, there's it's and having something to look at that is not, you know, the black and white of my computer screen, but is. Yeah, it is. I don't know how I would get by without it most days. 

Kelly  41:37  
Yes. Well, please tell listeners how they can get a copy of your book, whether or not they're going to knit while they read.

Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz  41:43  
Well, you can find the book now hopefully most places where books are sold online. It is available at the Cornell University Press website as well. And wherever books are sold. "Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and 19th Century American Foreign Relations."

Kelly  41:58  
Emily, thank you so much. This was a pleasure. It was a great book to read and I really enjoyed speaking with you. 

Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz  42:03  
Thanks. I had a lot of fun too.

Teddy  42:37  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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