Massacre in Shansi

by Nat Brandt

With his latest book, prize-winning, popular historian Nat Brandt turns his eye to a little-known group of Midwest missionaries who gave their lives for their religious beliefs. Brandt's careful research uncovers the life, attitudes, and Christianity of the Oberlin College missionaries from the late 1880s leading up to their deaths in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion in China. The eighteen missionaries who traveled to Shansi were dedicated, pious, hard-working clerics. Ernest Atwater, the young minister Francis Ward Davis and his wife Lydia, Charles Wesley Price and his family, and Susan Rowena Bird, to name a few, were all spurred by their strong beliefs, but they were also quite ignorant of other countries and cultures. Often having to live in disease-ravished areas of China and under harsh conditions, they were repulsed by the native lifestyle and saw further need to change it. Brandt presents finely wrought portraits of these people, detailing the lives of both the missionaries and