Richard M. Gamble offers more than just a fascinating study of the origins of Julie Ward Howe's ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and how the hymn inspired Northerners to reunite the divided nation and to abolish chattel slavery: he provides a window into how the national hymn has proved versatile enough to justify the nation's various wars since it was first penned in 1861. As such Gamble uses Howe's iconic hymn to examine the changing nature of American civil religion. After a chapter that explores the specific events that inspired Howe to compose the hymn, Gamble analyses Howe's Unitarian theology, Romanticism and nationalistic sensibilities as well as the rich biblical imagery of the hymn itself. The third chapter specifically reviews how Howe and her family tried to capitalise upon the hymn's enduring popularity in the nineteenth century, including efforts to have the hymn recognised as America's official national anthem. Subsequent chapters analyse the role that the hymn played during the Spanish-American war, the First and Second World Wars, the post-war campaign against Soviet totalitarianism and the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. As Gamble demonstrates, ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ proved to be protean enough to be appropriated in ways that Howe could have never envisioned when she first wrote it. British Socialists, for instance, adopted the hymn in the early twentieth century as one of its movement's anthems. Throughout the volume, Gamble explores the appearance of the hymn in various pieces of popular literature, such as in John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, The grapes of wrath, which took its title from Howe's hymn. Gamble uncovers some rather ironic uses of the hymn, too. The fact that Howe was a rather militant critic of Mormonism did not cause the Mormon Tabernacle to hesitate to adopt ‘The Battle Hymn’ for their repertoire in the 1890s. This was not the only ironic adaptation of the hymn – Mississippi native Elvis Presley once sang it during a laser-light show that projected patriotic images onto giant reliefs of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis at Stone Mountain, Georgia. In short, Gamble's engaging study makes a valuable contribution to the history of American civil religion through the lens of one of the most well-known hymns of the nineteenth century