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American Catholics thought little of China until distressing news reports began to appear in U.S. newspapers during the Sino-Western conflicts of the Boxer Uprising (1898–1900). By the turn of the century, the Catholic Church in the U.S. was awakened not only to China as America’s new adversary, but the Far East as a potential mission field. After this initial interaction, Sino-American Catholic exchange underwent three periods of transition, each one in turn transforming American Catholic identity and American Catholic assessments of China. First, American Catholics viewed themselves as more enlightened than the Chinese; they thus sought through missionary work to bring a more civilized Christian light to “darkened,” pagan China. Secondly, American missionaries in China were swept into the maelstrom of political transition as China entered an era of revolution from the 1920s through the 1940s. And thirdly, as an American Catholic transformation of “backward China” appeared untenable after the expulsion of foreign missionaries by the Communists in the early 1950s, China’s Catholic Church grew more independent and Americans grew largely apathetic to the situation of Chinese Catholics. This final stage is also marked by the growth of independent Chinese Catholic communities in the U.S. as the Chinese Catholic diaspora began efforts to recreate a familiar Chinese Catholic culture in America.

This essay suggests that a number of important poems written by Dickinson during the early 1860s were influenced or inspired by prose works by Harriet E. Prescott Spofford and Rose Terry Cooke, two once-bright stars in the short-lived and ill-defined constellation of authors that a disdainful Henry James (with the title of one of Spofford's romances in mind) later described as the "Azarian school" of American literature. Thomas Wentworth Higginson had already begun to serve as a mentor both for Spofford and for Cooke when, in 1862, Dickinson began her own correspondence with him, and when he inquired as to the extent of her familiarity with Spofford's work, her curious reply ("I read Miss Prescott's 'Circumstance,' but it followed me, in the Dark - so I avoided her - " [L261]) seems to have led most subsequent scholars to assume that the avoidance was permanent rather than temporary and that any indebtedness on Dickinson's part was therefore much less substantial than may have been the case. I argue here, then, that a number of Dickinson's descriptions of moments of great spiritual or psychological intensity—including "'Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch" (Fr425, 1862), "Dare you see a Soul at the 'White Heat'?" (Fr401, 1862), and "I started Early - Took my Dog - " (Fr656, 1863)—are in fact distillations, as it were, of already intense prose passages that she had encountered in "The Amber Gods" (1860), "Circumstance" (1860), "Yet's Christmas Box" (1860), "The South Breaker" (1862), and other self-consciously exotic tales published in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Monthly —and that we might, in consequence, profitably regard her as a covert member of the "Azarian School."

“The best thing about diplomatic life,” Joseph C. Grew once confided to his diary, “… is that one never knows when some event or development of prime importance is going to occur. We pursue the even tenor of our ways for weeks and months and then, often suddenly and unexpectedly, we find ourselves in the midst of a maelstrom of hectic activity, working day and night, rushing telegrams, drafting press communiqués and speeches, dashing from place to place, doing useful work.” Turbulent Era, the account of the forty years he spent as a career diplomat in the American Foreign Service, is convincing evidence that Joseph Grew was present on an extraordinary number of occasions when something of importance broke and that, above all, he was always doing useful work for the country he served so faithfully and so well.