Lost Missions: American Indians, Religion, and Shifting Landscapes of Memory (Public History in Historical Perspective)

Tracing how shuttered mission schools became contested commemorative landscapes During the Early Republic and Jacksonian eras, Euro-American colonists and Native nations in the South and Old Northwest established mission schools intended to Christianize Indigenous peoples.In Lost Missions, Sean T. Jacobson recovers the histories and afterlives of these institutions, arguing that they played a far more consequential role in Native-settler relations than scholars have previously acknowledged.Mission schools advanced a spiritual vision of a multiethnic Christian America-one that ultimately collapsed amid the federally sponsored Indian Removal campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s. Following the closure of these schools, their physical and symbolic landscapes became powerful sites of memory.Euro-American Christians later transformed former missions into commemorative spaces that celebrated "frontier" piety and national expansion.Through monuments, pageantry, and local histories, Protestant and