Our Country

by Josiah Strong, Congregational Home Missionary Society (Creator)

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Genres: American History

244 pages, Paperback

First published June 4, 2010

About the author

Josiah Strong (April 14, 1847 – June 26, 1916) was an American Protestant clergyman, organizer, editor and author. He was a leader of the Social Gospel movement, calling for social justice and combating social evils. He supported missionary work so that all races could be improved and uplifted and thereby brought to Christ. He is controversial, however, due to his beliefs about race and methods of converting people to Christianity. In his 1885 book Our Country, Strong argued that Anglo Saxons are a superior race who must "Christianize and civilize" the "savage" races, which he argued would be good for the American economy and the "lesser races".

Reviews

[Scott Done · Rating 1 out of 5]

**Read For Class**

🤢🤢🤢

[Luis Roberto Reyes Romero · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written circa 1885 by a clergyman, the book, as expected, has too much religion indoctrination for my taste (and a tad bit of xenophobia). However; despite its flaws, this book is a solid read for anybody trying to understand the events in the world we are living in right now (i.e., post-truth, post-facts, post-decency, etc.)

This book is situated in an America that had only ~60M of inhabitants but that was going through tremendous growth, and westward expansion. This America was already the pre-eminent global economic power and was in a similar state of confusion as we are right now, with strong technological forces creating unprecedented wealth but also huge inequalities

Ultimately this book can calm down those that believe that we are near the end of the world. This phrase taken from the book (not verbatim) shows how societies (1) are always facing the same challenges, (2) are scared and think it is the end of the wold and (3) ultimately finds a solution: "In a word, the difficulty of our times is knowledge multiplied (by the printing press), and wealth multiplied and centralized (by the steam engine and unchecked capitalism)"

Just replace in that last phrase "printing press" for "internet", and "steam engine" by "internet, AI, etc." and you get to the same problems that we are facing today, more than 100 years later

Again, a great read is you can see past the religious fanaticism and xenophobic/racist statement