The American Missionary — Volume 49, No. 02, February, 1895

A genuine voice from the winter of 1895, this issue of The American Missionary offers an unfiltered window into the American Missionary Association's ambitious project of racial uplift and educational reform at the close of the 19th century. The publication bustles with reports from mission stations spanning the South and frontier, detailed financial statements, and heartfelt appeals for continued support from the religious faithful. Readers will find updates on Howard University and other institutions the AMA sustained, sketches of dedicated missionaries laboring in classrooms and churches, and the organization's impassioned arguments for why American Christians must invest in the moral and intellectual development of formerly enslaved people and Native communities. This is not history written about the era, but history as it was being made and narrated by its participants. For scholars of American religious history, the Post-Civil War South, or the formation of Black higher education, these yellowed pages pulse with the ambitions, anxieties, and assumptions of an era when the battle for America's soul seemed, to some, just beginning.