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