“Providence Has Freed Our Hands”: Women's Missions and the American Encounter with Japan. By Karen K. Seat. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. xvii + 193 pp. $22.95 cloth.

摘要

The transnational reappraisal of American history during the past two decadesnhas revived scholarly attention to the American women’s foreign missionarynmovement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historiannIan Tyrrell had warned that the past scholarship in transnational perspectiventended to emphasize the transatlantic perspective and repeatedly called fornmore scholarship on the transpacific perspective. He further argued in 2007nthat the transpacific perspective was a promising framework becausen“American involvement in the Pacific in the nineteenth century was part of anglobal outlook” and would thus produce “a new way of conceptualizingnAmerican history as a whole” (“Looking Eastward: Pacific and GlobalnPerspectives on American History in the Nineteenth and Early TwentiethnCenturies,” The Japanese Journal of American Studies 18 [2007]: 42).