Lost Missions: American Indians, Religion, and Shifting Landscapes of

Lost Missions: American Indians, Religion, and Shifting Landscapes of Memory, volume 1, examines the complex history of mission schools established during the Early Republic and Jacksonian eras. Sean T. Jacobson explores how these institutions in the South and Old Northwest sought to Christianize Indigenous peoples through a specific spiritual vision of a multiethnic America. This history book details how the collapse of these schools during the Indian Removal campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s transformed physical locations into contested commemorative landscapes.

The text traces how Euro-American settlers later recast missionary labor as a cornerstone of national expansion and frontier piety. These narratives often sanitized the violence and dispossession inherent in westward expansion. Lost Missions: American Indians, Religion, and Shifting Landscapes of Memory, volume 1, provides a critical history of how these sites evolved from religious centers to symbols of nation-building and, eventually, to spaces of Indigenous persistence and survival.