Book Reviews 933

Againstthe Devils Current: The Life andTimes The authors, previously affiliated with Ro­ ofCyrus Hamlin. By Marcia Stevens and Mal­ bert College and the American University in colm Stevens. (Lanham: University Press of Beirut, have given their biography a revealing America, 1988. xii + 504 pp. $34.75.) subtitle: it does in fact read like a modernzed, expanded version of Hamlin's 1893 autobiog­ was well known in the late nine­ raphy, My Life and Times. This is Hamlin as teenth century to Americans interested in Prot­ he saw himself, an almost five-hundred-page­

estant foreign missions, higher education, or long narrative reflecting no awareness of how Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/76/3/933/760375 by guest on 27 September 2021 Turkey. This biography incorporates extensive he fits into the larger historical picture. Refer­ quotations from Hamlin's books and correspon­ ences to relevant scholarly studies are lacking, dence to provide both an immense amount of no evaluations or interpretations are offered, and information about him and a clear sense ofhis since the book presents little useful new infor­ personality. It fails, however, to connect the in­ mation, it makes no contribution to the efforts dividual with the broader contexts ofhis time. of historians of education, religion, United Hamlin was a leading educator, States foreign affairs, and the Middle East to from 1839 to 1859 the director of the Bebek understand Hamlin and the movements in Seminary for Armenians, which was related to which he took part. For informed judgements the Constantinople mission of the American of Hamlin's historical significance, the reader Board ofCommissioners for Foreign Missions, will need to turn to existing studies such as Frank and then president of in Con­ Andrews Stone's Academiesfor Anatolia (1984) stantinople for eighteen years. He left the board on missionary education in Turkey, William R. for the college because other and Hutchison's Errandto the World (1987) on mis­ board officers disapproved ofhis preference for sionary ideology, or]ames A. Field,]r.'sAmeri­ indirect means ofproclaiming the gospel (such ca and the Mediterranean World, 1776-1882 as English-language education and charity), his (1969) on Americans in the Middle East. The insistence on vocational rather than ministerial needed reassessment ofthis leading proponent training for native Christians, and his commer­ of"modern" higher education as both an evan­ cial activities in support of the school. As an gelistic method and a vehicle for the export of ''American college" reflecting Hamlin's values, American culture is, unfortunately, not ad­ Robert College epitomized advanced Western vanced by this biography. education in the Middle East. Hamlin spent Robert A. Schneider his final twenty-three years in the United States, Temple University as professor at Bangor Seminary, president of , and in active retirement in Lexington, Massachusetts. He died in 1900. Establishing Zion: The Mormon Church in the The familiar stories about Hamlin are all re­ American W1!st, 1847-1869. By Eugene E. Camp­ told in this biography: his bell. (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1988. x + 346 steam engine; fearless confrontations with an­ pp. $20.95.) gry Turkish mobs and hostile officials; the sale ofmission-baked bread to British Crimean War The late Eugene E. Campbell has left us asolid troops; the ideological clash with American monograph on the first generation ofMormon­ Board secretary Rufus Anderson; the praise for ism in Utah, a period for which we have had Cyrus from his more secularly famous cousin, no recent work of synthesis. United States vice president I-Iannibal Ham­ Campbell's theme is not far from the old­ lin. These anecdotes are accompanied by fashioned one offrontier histoty: confrontation, lengthy- sometimes overwhelming- descrip­ change, survival: "the story ofMormonism's two­ tions ofpeople, places, emotions, and daily life fold struggle- the colonization ofthe Great Ba­ in the nineteenth century. There is nothing new sin and surrounding area as a place of refuge here except the quotations from Hamlin's pre­ and confrontation with desert, Indian, and fed­ viously unpublished correspondence, and there eral officials, as the Saints tried to establish the is no indication ifor how this material affects Kingdom of God." He offers no new facts, in­ our current understanding of Hamlin. sights, or interpretations but does exploit, crit-