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 Catholic Americans alike recast missionary labor as a foundational component of American nation-building. In doing so, these narratives framed the Christianization of Native peoples as a benevolent civilizing project, one that implicitly-and sometimes explicitly-sanitized the coercion, dispossession, and violence that accompanied westward expansion and the forced removal of Indigenous nations. By the late twentieth century, however, these commemorative narratives faded. Suburban development, commercialization, and shifting cultural priorities rendered many mission sites once again "lost," stripped of the civic meaning they once held. Yet Jacobson shows that these landscapes still speak, especially when viewed from Indigenous perspectives. Reinterpreted through Native histories of endurance and survival, former missions reveal counternarratives of persistence amid profound loss. As tribal nations increasingly engage with these sites today, Lost Missions probes their contested status as places of memory and conscience, illuminating how public history continues to shape and challenge understandings of America's colonial past.
Sean T. Jacobson is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Alabama.
"Lost Missions combines deep historical research with public history methods and theory to create an impressive study of missions and how they have been used and remembered. The book will be of interest to students of public history as well as Native American Studies."-Philip Levy, editor (with Leah Glaser) of Branching Out: The Public History of Trees and author of the James Deetz Book Prize winning The Permanent Resident: Excavations and Explorations of George Washington's Life "Part history, part historiography, and part critique of current local interpretation, Lost Missions is a true achievement of historical research."-Lisa Blee, author (with Jean M. O'Brien) of Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit and Framing Chief Leschi: Narratives and the Politics of Historical Justice
