Massacre in Shansi

About the Book

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-ravaged area 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 thier converts, their experiences in the interior province of Shansi, and their struggle in trying to spread Christianity among people whose language they did not speak and whose traditions and customs they did not nderstand.

Brandt's gripping narrative brings to light a penetrating and sincere study of the "Oberlin Band" of Protestant missionaries and captures the essence of their daily life. Considered in a fair and honest context, the descriptions are often taken directly from personal correspondence and journals.

This tragic story of the clash between two cultures is primarily the story of the missionaries...six men, seven women, and five children. Their names appear on bronze tablets on the only monument in America ever erected to individuals who died in that uprising, the Memorial Arch on the campus of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.

About the Author

Nat Brandt is a veteran journalist who began his career with CBS News as a senior newswriter, then turned to print journalism. He was a reporter on several newspapers in Connecticut and New Jersey before joining The New York Times as an editor, working primarily on the National News Desk. Subsequently, he was Man-aging Editor of American Heritage magazine and Editor-in-Chief of Publishers Weekly. He is a past president of the nation's oldest journalists' organization, the Society of the Silurians. A native of New York City, Brandt majored in history at the University of Rochester and was a member of the school's history honor society, the Morey Club. He has written many articles dealing with American history--among them, stories about Ander-sonville prison, Sergeant York, the Blizzard of '88 and the Pledge of Allegiance. He has been a freelance author since 1980, and has taught as an adjunct professor of journalism at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of New York University and at St. John's University in Queens, New York. His book, "How Free Are We? What the Constitution Says We Can and Cannot Do," was co-authored with the dean of the N.Y.U. Law School. Another book, "The Man Who Tried to Burn New York"--about a Confederate plot to burn New York City in 1864--won the Douglas Southall Freeman History Award in 1987. In 1993, Brandt was Journalist-in-Residence at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, taught a course in magazine writing at Ohio State University and was a consultant for the Columbus Dispatch. Brandt's other books are: "Mr. Tubbs' Civil War," based on a private collection of letters written by Union soldiers; "Harlem at War: The Black Experience in WWII"; "The Town That Started the Civil War"--about the rescue of a slave in Oberlin, Ohio--which was a best-selling Book-of-the-Month Club and History Book Club selection; "The Congressman Who Got Away With Murder," which dealt with a sensational murder trial in 1859; "Massacre in Shansi," the story of a group of missionaries caught up in the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900; and "Con Brio: Four Russians Called the Budapest String Quartet." Brandt has lectured on both the East and West Coasts on Civil War subjects, and at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., on both the Civil War and the Harlem riot of World War II. He is currently the co-creator of the television series, "Crucible of the Millennium," which will be broadcast by PBS in the fall of 2000.