In The Common School Awakening, David Komline crosses the too-often absolute boundary between the history of American religion and the history of American education. The book is a very important read for scholars of either field and I hope it will be read—and discussed—widely at scholarly gatherings and across the usual overly rigid boundaries of subdisciplines of American cultural development. It should be widely read by students in religion and in education who want to understand the inner workings of an era very different from our own.

Ironically the central thesis of the book—that transatlantic evangelical Protestantism was among the primary influences in the creation of the American public school system as we have known it for close to two centuries—is not new. Timothy L. Smith made a similar argument in his many publications, starting with Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Abingdon, 1957) and expanded in his 1967 article “Protestant Schooling and American Nationality, 1800–1850” in the Journal of American History 53, no 4. Komline does note the importance of David Tyack's “The Kingdom of God and the Common School: Protestant Ministers and the Educational Awakening in the West,” published in the Harvard Educational Review 36, no. 4, also in 1966. For Smith, the “common school awakening,” like so many antebellum reform efforts, had its roots in Evangelical Protestantism. Neither the pre-Civil War education movements that created the public schools nor the religious commitment that fostered so much of the reform can be understood except in the relationship to each other.

Recognizing Smith's and to some extent Tyack's pathbreaking work does not for a moment lessen the importance of Komline's book. For one thing, Smith, if not Tyack, is virtually forgotten except among a small circle of aging historians. And Tyack is remembered much more for later work than his early work on religion. A new book more than half a century later was badly needed. But, also, Komline adds much more detail and a much richer analysis to the story than has ever been offered before. Early in my engagement with the book, I learned a great deal about early opposition to the evangelical efforts to reshape not only American education but all of American society. The pan-Protestant domination of American culture, especially between 1800 and 1850, was so strong that few historians have looked at those who opposed this development. Komline does. The book is also a gold mine of information about key players in the common school revival such as New York's John Van Ness Yates or the English transplant Joseph Lancaster. Later in the volume, Calvin Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Samuel Lewis get similarly wonderful detailed treatments. In the conclusion, the author also does an especially strong job of tracing the growing emphasis on schooling across the country, including generally overlooked developments in Tennessee, Michigan, Virginia, and Texas. Among other things, Komline aims to show that the well-recognized Horace Mann was not alone but was one among many in leading a new and intensified effort to create an American system of public schooling. He succeeds. Finally, Komline describes the unraveling of the Protestant consensus that supported a crusade for schooling in intra-Protestant rivalry and later Protestant-Catholic tensions. I strongly suspect that the growing tensions over slavery and questions of race that dominated American political discourse by the 1850s also played a larger role than Komline acknowledges, especially with the splits within white Protestant denominations and the growing strength of African American churches. This book is also extraordinarily well researched with an impressive fifty-four pages of endnotes that will delight any future scholar looking to dig further into any aspect of this book's focus. I learned a lot from reading this book.

Komline does a masterful job of crisscrossing the Atlantic. European educators, especially those in England and Prussia, receive similar attention to the Americans. British and German influences on American education and religious development, as well as important differences between Prussia, England, and the United States, are clear and well done. Komline rightly describes both the religious and the educational developments that are his focus as international in scope. If there is ever a second edition, I would like to see him expand the breadth of coverage to look at global developments in the era. For example, Komline notes that a British priest, Alexander Bell, developed an education system quite similar to the one that made Joseph Lancaster famous while he was teaching in British India in the late 1700s. Recent scholars (see Jana Tschurenev, “Diffusing Useful Knowledge: The Monitorial System of Education in Madras, London and Bengal, 1789–1840,” Paedagogica Historica 44, no. 3 [June 2008]) have noted that Bell did not just happen to live in India when doing this but was influenced by older Indian educational approaches in developing what became the Lancasterian model of schooling. In an era of European imperialism, European and North American educational developments not only influenced the rest of the world, but the rest of the world influenced what happened in the metropolitan centers.

All of this said, The Common School Awakening is an extremely valuable book and I recommend it highly to readers of Church History or any historian of religion or of education, especially those interested in the Second Great Awakening and the Common School Revival and the interplay between the two.