Tyrell, Ian. Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Summary
This book broadens the context of the drive toward American imperialism – placing it in the wider patterns of informal American expansion and transnational networks and focuses on American voluntary reform abroad from the 1880s to the 1920s. These moral reformers who exported their ideas and responded to situations that reshaped their programs. Americans exported a wide variety of organizations with the sole purpose of moral uplift: Women’s Christian Temperance Union, YM(W)CA, and World’s Good Habits Society as well as a range of missionary organizations and denominational churches. These groups saw their work as a kind of Christian moral empire that rose above “nation” and formed a loose coalition that lobbied for changes in the United Sates’ relationship with its colonies and the wider world. Tyrell argues that the boundaries between Christian networks and formal empire were blurred, “with the latter phenomenon essentially embedded within the former.” (5) The moral movement of the 1880s to the 1920s was intrinsic to the process, not just a rhetorical justification. The transnational organizing and networks forged by these moral reformers became part of the foundation of American global power in the 20th century. The 1920s onward saw the ebbing of Evangelical Missionary work and the growth of more secular/less spiritual certain aid/volunteer work, at home and abroad.

Example: Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions

See also:  Paul Kramer, Andrew Zimmerman