When immigrants living in rural Midwest envisioned foreign nations, they often lamented the lack of Protestant Christianity and “civilization” that they saw. Earlier posts in this series documented many of these complaints as they pertained to China, Japan, and the Arctic. These rural Midwesterners believed that most of the world lagged behind them and that it was their duty to transform the world into their own image. Throughout the late nineteenth century, writers for a local publication in the rural Michigan town of Holland acknowledged only one non-European nation as having a measure of “civilization” on par with their own Read more