The American Missionary — Volume 32, No. 09, September, 1878

This September 1878 issue of The American Missionary offers an unflinching window into the complex world of Reconstruction-era America. Through field reports, editorials, and personal testimonies, readers encounter teachers and missionaries laboring in mission schools across the South, documenting both the fierce hunger for literacy among freedmen and the relentless obstacles they faced: funding shortfalls, white supremacist violence, and a nation eager to forget its promises. The publication illuminates Atlanta University's early days, where systematic beneficence aimed to build something lasting out of emancipation's chaotic aftermath. Yet this is no simple tale of benevolence. The AMA's project was entangled with cultural paternalism, Christianization agendas, and the era's tangled beliefs about race and uplift. Here too are accounts of work among Indigenous communities and Chinese immigrants, revealing the Association's broader vision of America as a nation to be remade through faith and education. For historians and anyone seeking to understand how Americans once imagined transforming their fractured society, these pages preserve voices from the front lines of that ambitious, flawed, and deeply human endeavor.