The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic

Award-winning historian John Demos tells the astonishing and moving story of a unique missionary project, which probes the very roots of American identity.

Near the start of the nineteenth century, as the United States looked outward to the wider world, a group of eminent Protestant ministers devised a grand scheme for gathering the rest of mankind into the redemptive fold of Christianity and "civiization." Its core element was a special school for "heathen youth" drawn from all parts of the...