"In 2003, Olufemi Vaughan received from his ninety-five-year-old father, Abiodun, a trove of more than 3,000 letters written by four generations of his family in Ibadan, Nigeria, between 1926 to 1994. The men and women who wrote these letters had emerged from the religious, social, and educational institutions established by the Church Missionary Society, the preeminent Anglican mission in the Atlantic Nigerian region following the imposition of British colonial rule. Abiodun, recruited to be a civil servant in the colonial administration, became the patriarch of a prominent family with historical roots in both West Africa and the Americas; his family was the subject of articles in Ebony and Jet as well as in acclaimed histories. Reading deeply in these letters, Olufemi realized he had a unique set of sources that could be used to illuminate everyday life for this important segment of Nigerian society. Letter writing was a dominant form of communication for western-educated elites in colonial Africa, especially in Nigeria. Exposure and an altruistic sense of nationalism were among the factors that led people to begin exchanging letters, particularly in their interactions with British colonial authorities. Through careful textual analysis and broad contextualization, Vaughan reconstructs dominant storylines, including themes such as peoples relationships with colonial authorities and bureaucracy, ideas about faith and kinship, nationalism and communal development. Vaughan brings his prodigious skills as a historian to bear on this wealth of information, bringing to life a portrait, at once intimate and expansive, of a community during a transformative period in African history"--.