Sandra C. Taylor

Bio: Sandra C. Taylor is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Missionary diplomacy & China. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 5 publications receiving 26 citations.

Leaving the Concentration Camps: Japanese American Resettlement in Utah and the Intermountain West

Abstract: "We didn't care for regimentation, "said George Kondo, a Nisei from San Francisco. "Get in line for this and get in line for that, you know, so the first opportunity we had, [we left.]... If you have a sponsor, a place to stay and salary, [you could leave.]... We were able to get out.... [W]e were able to leave." Just two and a half months after Kondo and his wife were moved from the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno to the Central Utah Relocation Center at Topaz, Utah, they were free again, living in Chicago. They were some of the first Japanese Americans to be resettled after their forced departure from the West Coast in September 1942.1 Much attention has been focused on the evacuation and

The Ineffectual Voice: Japan Missionaries and American Foreign Policy, 1870-1941

Abstract: DESPITE THE PASSAGE of forty years, the Pacific War still poses many questions for historians. One is that of the paradox behind Pearl Harbor. Why did two countries with so much in common, as Akira Iriye has recently argued, become such implacable enemies that war was the only way of resolving their differences? A partial answer lies in America's prewar image of Japan. Japan's case was never very convincingly argued before the American people, whereas China's was. The United States became China's friend and

Salt Lake City and Stereotypes of the Russians

Abstract: In the spring of 2001, when I was in Moscow on a Fulbright grant, I visited the Armed Forces Museum. In an outdoor courtyard that was basically a graveyard for outmoded weaponry, I saw an American Pershing II missile, one of a class of military hardware that had been aimed at the Soviets during the height of the second phase of the Cold War. It stood beside Russian ICBMs, tanks, and artillery pieces, testimony to the hostility that had recently marked the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Pershing II missile, part of a weapons system that went nowhere in conflict but had been decommissioned and dismantled in 1987, wound up in Moscow in peace. In that year, the United States and the Soviet Union made diplomatic progress toward nuclear arms control. The previous year at the summit conference at Reykjavik, Iceland, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had tried to persuade President Ronald Reagan to agree to a complete renunciation of nuclear weapons. The attempt foundered on ReaganOs love of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), but, after much maneuvering, Gorbachev did persuade Reagan to agree to the Intermediate Nuclear Forces

Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan: The Development of the Feminist Movement

Abstract: Winner of the 2nd place in the 2012 European Association for Japanese Studies Book Prize. "In this clear and wonderfully informative study, Mara Patessio steps beyond the more traditional focus on 'great lives' or 'important movements' to explore the complicated social networks that drew Meiji women together across boundaries of class and region earlier imagined as impermeable. While offering affecting portraits of notable female educators, students, writers, and activists, Patessio suggests that a host of other voices, until now largely forgotten, was every bit as significant in contributing to the emerging nation and fomenting the feminist movement in Japan." ?Rebecca Copeland, Washington University in St. Louis

A country in need of American instruction : The U.S. mission to shape and transform Mexico, 1848-1911

Abstract: This dissertation examines U.S. views of Mexico from the end of the U.S.-Mexico War in 1848, to the end of the first phase of the Mexican Revolution in May 1911. During this period numerous Americans saw Mexico as a laboratory to test their ability to transform a country seemingly in need of guidance. Americans, however, struggled to define the role of the United States: whether it was solely to be a model for other nations to follow, or whether Americans should be actively involved in this process. In the years after the U.S. Civil War, a diverse group of Americans, especially missionaries, investors, and working-class activists, saw Mexico as a nation in need of change and sought to affect its transformation through the means of informal imperialism. Yet they vigorously disagreed whether this transformation should occur in religious, political, economic or social terms. Despite these differences, they all believed that Mexico could be reshaped in the image of the United States. Their views thus provided a powerful counternarrative to persistent U.S. images of the Mexican people as irredeemable because of allegedly inherent inferiorities based on race, religion or culture. The dissertation also examines the role of Mexican actors in attracting, resisting and altering U.S. informal imperialism. These Mexican actors included government officials who petitioned for U.S. assistance during the French Intervention (1862-67) and the Porfiriato (1876-1911); dissident Catholic priests who requested aid for the fledgling Protestant movement in Mexico; and Mexican liberal exiles from the repressive Diaz regime, who sought U.S. support in bringing a democratic government to Mexico.

A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End: The nadir: 1945–1953

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. The Revolution, 1917-21 3. New economic policies, 1921-9 4. The first Five-Year Plan 5. High Stalinism 6. A great and patriotic war 7. The nadir: 1945-53 8. The age of Khrushchev 9. Real, existing socialism 10. Failed reforms 11. Leap into the unknown 12. Afterthoughts Chronology.

From Missions to Mission to beyond Missions: The Historiography of American Protestant Foreign Missions since World War II:

Abstract: I n 1964,R. Pierce Beaver, professor of history of missions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, wrote From Missions toMission. In his book, this eminent American mission historian reviewed the early part of the twentieth century and saw a Christianity that had ridden to success on the coattails of Euro-American imperialismand prestige. Two world wars, how­ ever, had demonstrated to growing nationalist movements in the developing world that Christianity was not part of a superior culture and that, furthermore, it was an agent of colonialism. Beaver went on to analyze the currentclimate for world missions, which included militant nationalism, urbanization, seculariza­ tion, repudiation of the West, and revivals of non-Christian religions. To move forward in such a context, he said, missions must begin to cooperate among themselves and with younger, non-Western churches on behalf of Christ's mission. Beaver saw embodied in the World Council of Churches the beginning of new approaches to mission that would stress reconciliation over competition, and peace and justice issues alongside proclama­ tion. Missions from the West should become a common world­ wide enterprise; pluralism must give way to unity. Beaver's small volume, its prescience notwithstanding, il­ lustrates the danger of historians drawing on the past in order to predict the future. The ecumenical movement that Beaver touted as the source of new forms of mission had within ten years so modified the definition of mission that confusion over its mean­ ing was Widespread in mainline churches. When Beaver retired from the University of Chicago in 1971, his post was eliminated, a practice followed in numerous mainline institutions during the 1970s. \"Foreign missions\" had become \"universal mission,\" only to evaporate into generalizations. Oddly enough, the North American evangelical missionaries whom Beaver described in 1964 as \"sectarian and partisan,\" and as disrupting the unity of mission \"for the first time in three hundred years\" (p. 98), surpassed mainline missionaries in number and vigor. Today, with pluralism celebrated and competition among religions fierce, with nondenominational missions dwarfing the efforts of the old mainline, with indigenous Pentecostalism exploding in nooks and crannies around the world, the prospect for mission in the twenty-first century is dynamic and diverse but bears little resemblance to the top-down, unified witness Beaver envisioned in 1964. It is the thesis of this essay that we have moved from \"mission\" to \"beyond missions.\" The road from \"missions\" to \"mission\" and \"beyond mis­ sions,\" traveled so painfully by American Protestantism since World War II, has been trod as well by the historians of North American missions. Mission history prior to World War II was largely a denominational affair, told from the perspective of efforts by individual denominations to spread their form of Christianity around the globe.' Beaver and other mission histo­ rians of the post-World War II generation envisioned the Protes­ tant foreign mission enterprise through the lens of ecumenical