The Christian Herald becomes an illuminating window into American humanitarianism at the turn of the twentieth century in Heather Curtis's Holy Humanitarians. The historiography of American humanitarianism in this era has tended to emphasize a shift from religiously oriented missionary organizations toward government-sponsored, secular organizations, like the American Red Cross. Yet as Curtis amply demonstrates, the turn of the century, in fact, saw a robust evangelical engagement with humanitarian causes.

For Reverend Thomas De Witt Talmage and Louis Klopsch, humanitarian crises overseas demanded an evangelical American response. When these partners took over the Christian Herald in 1890, they made the paper attractive to a broad swath of evangelicals through an emphasis on service and the claim that global engagement was essential for American Christians. The paper circulated widely, with a readership that well outstripped their closest competition among religious periodicals and many popular literary weekly papers as well. Major fundraising campaigns through the newspaper provided essential aid to suffering peoples at home and abroad. Within the United States, the most significant and enduring effects of these commitments is the Bowery Mission in New York City. Overseas, it resulted in shiploads of relief leaving the United States for destinations including Russia, Turkey, Cuba, India, China, and Japan.

The book opens with a chapter profiling the editors’ aims to make the Christian Herald into a paper that could make a difference in the world by bringing together American Christians in service of those in need throughout the world and at home. In the early efforts to raise money for famine-struck Russia, Talmage and Klopsch explained that humanitarian aid would augment American political and economic interests even as it fulfilled a religious duty. This was not a simple task, however, as their efforts for the Bowery Mission in New York City revealed. There, the paper necessarily entered into debates about poverty and the most effective means of eradicating it. Individual chapters cover the 1894 earthquake in Constantinople and the subsequent Armenian massacres of 1894–1896, humanitarian interventions in Cuba before and during the Spanish-American War, the 1899 famine in India, and the Boxer Rebellion and famine in China. The book's final two chapters cover early twentieth century transitions toward more political action and emphasis on domestic charity through the Bowery Mission.

Throughout these chapters, Curtis is particularly effective at exploring connections between international aid, cosmopolitanism, and empire. In the Armenian case, the earthquake led to some early efforts to encourage giving across the boundaries of religious difference, though this impulse was quickly quashed by news of the massacre of Armenian Christians. Subsequent coverage in the paper used stereotypes of the Turks and stressed the importance of American Christians aiding their oppressed co-religionists. Yet this aggressive stance made it difficult for the Christian Herald to reach those whom they hoped to help and forced them to rely upon Clara Barton's American Red Cross, with its stated position of neutrality, to deliver their aid. Time and again, international aid could bring up questions about supporting non-Christians that presented a challenge for an evangelical newspaper. In Cuba, the humanitarian leadership of the Christian Herald helped American evangelicals to understand the war as one of righteous liberation that could open the way for humanitarian intervention, with implications not only for Cuba but also for the Philippines and more. Curtis expertly explores the ways in which the editors navigated these questions in multiple contexts as she discusses both the domestic and international aspects of the Christian Herald’s humanitarian reach.

The ongoing competition between Klopsch and Barton provides a fascinating thread through many of these chapters. If the American Red Cross (ARC) dominates the historiographic coverage of humanitarianism in this era, that is perhaps a mirror of the struggle for leadership in international humanitarianism between the ARC and the Christian Herald in their own time. Klopsch worked to make sure that the paper received appropriate credit for its significant contributions to American humanitarian efforts in places like Cuba, where the leaders of the ARC and Christian Herald struggled for dominance. This was both a principled and a personal conflict. While differences of method and, occasionally, priorities mattered, so too did Klopsch's desire to have the Christian Herald recognized as the preeminent engine of American international humanitarianism. The gendered dynamics of these conflicts invite further scrutiny. In some of the conflicts that Curtis describes, it appears that as much as anything else, Klopsch simply could not bear the idea of being under the oversight of a female leader. The back and forth between these is a helpful window into the ways that religious organizations continued to operate within a changing institutional context.

The focus on a single, extremely popular, publication provides a useful focus for this broadly sweeping story. In the newspaper's pages, Curtis not only travels the globe, but reveals the many debates that roiled the evangelical and charitable worlds in these decades. Talmage and Klopsch spent their leadership of the newspaper arguing that humanitarian giving could provide a much-needed unifier for a diverse religious landscape. Yet with the rise of scientific charity, there were no shortage of debates over how to go about serving the world, who deserved help, and how to weigh the relative needs of those at home and those abroad. These questions, of course, remain relevant today. Holy Humanitarians is essential reading for anyone wanting to better understand the place of religion in the complex dynamics at work in humanitarian activism, cosmopolitanism, and American empire.