American Protestant missionaries were heavily grounded in ethnocentric and imperialist impulses, but many returned to America as advocates of foreign peoples and as agents of anti-racist, anti-parochial, anti-imperialist causes. In one arena of American life after another, missionaries were among the most active in diminishing provincialism and in appreciating cultural diversity.

David A. Hollinger is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and is President of the Organization of American Historians. His books include Postethnic America (1995), Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (1996), and Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity (2006). His recent essays have appeared in the London Review of Books and the American Historical Review. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center (an initiative of the American Historical Association) and the Wilson Center. The seminar is grateful for the support given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.