A neglected theme in the history of Christian missions is the understanding and appropriation of the European Protestant Reformations by generations of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. This study documents and analyzes American Board missionary reception of the Protestant Reformations, and their application to mission work in the Ottoman Near East from 1820 to 1870.

A distinctive trait of nineteenth-century American Protestantism was social and religious reform at home and abroad through foreign missionary agencies. The largest mission agency in the early nineteenth century was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), founded by New England Congregationalists in 1810. The ABCFM's Near East Missions between 1820 and 1870 were visualized as a social reform movement overseas. By making Protestant converts, establishing evangelical churches, and founding the first two American colleges within the Ottoman Empire, American Board missionaries perceived themselves as social, religious and educational reformers akin to the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century.

By a close reading of the memoirs and travelogues of the missionaries as primary source material, this dissertation explores missionary self-perceptions as reformers. The structure of this dissertation reflects the chronological development of missionary reforms in the Ottoman Near East between 1820, when the first pair of missionaries arrived, and 1870, when the ABCFM underwent a process of denominational restructuring.