Throughout the nineteenth century, African Americans struggled to identify with both of their appellations. They did so by forging their own history. This process, Julius Bailey explains, was discursive and involved a polyphony of African American voices about their own past, present, and future. Bailey's Race Patriotism describes this discursive process through a set of themes pertinent to African American identity and history. Throughout, the members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) wrestled with the American grand narrative and with their own narratives. The book is lucid, well-documented, and will appeal to readers interested in African American history and religion, religion and print culture, and history of the book.

Bailey's main thesis is that members of the AME harnessed and reflected the literary and intellectual trends of the second half of the nineteenth century in their medium, the Christian Recorder, and that this medium allowed for readers and editors to discuss themes and construct a consensus on African American identity. Ironically, Bailey chronicles a plurality of opinions on these themes and illustrates that consensus was a complicated product. The book is organized in two parts. The first two chapters catalogue the history of African American literature. Chapter 1 describes the protest theme evident in this literature. This theme is crucial to Bailey because he narrates the early history of the AME as a protest movement by Richard Allen and others against the segregationist procedures of the Methodist Episcopal Church that led to Allen's removal and founding of the AME. Bailey traces the protest theme through anti-slavery literature of the early republic cast in an African American voice, first-person accounts of African Americans travelling to Africa, and finally to the various publications of the AME. Chapter 2 develops further the history of AME publications. Here Bailey explains how the Christian Recorder and other works shaped the AME as a literate denomination and the members as a “reading people.” While the corpus itself offered readers a host of texts that they could consume, the Christian Recorder mediated the readers' encounters with texts by teaching “their audience skills by which to assess the growing body of treatises” (38). Bailey then addresses three themes that garnered prolonged discussion: the frontier history of African Methodists and masculinity, the “African” identity of the AME, and the debate about whether or not to emigrate to Africa following emancipation. Bailey devotes a chapter to each of these topics.

The book relies on a wealth of African American literature. Indeed, Bailey goes to great length to allow the voices of AME members to speak clearly and cogently on these topics. For the specialist in print culture but not in African American history, the footnotes and bibliography are helpful and welcomed. However, the book's bibliography is so focused on African American history that there is little comprehension of how the book's themes fit within the broader context of American history and of race relations in the latter nineteenth century. The book attempts to stress that the Christian Recorder reflected AME members' protest against race prejudice. At times, however, this point gets lost when Bailey describes more about protest and debate within the AME regarding its own concerns, specifically emigration and the denomination's name. Instead, chapters 4 and 5 show that AME members were emphasizing their American and their African qualities while resisting the exclusivity of either term.

The book makes a more direct attempt at demonstrating protest in the third chapter about the frontier history of the AME. In this chapter, Bailey states that AME histories of its frontier phase critiqued white descriptions of manhood. They did so by celebrating the respectability and virility of the intrepid founders of the denomination in western lands. Bailey situates these images of AME masculinity within the context of new notions of masculinity in the last third of the nineteenth century. These new notions, promulgated by the white middle-class, stressed “bodily strength and social authority” (43). Therefore, AME histories focused on the robust physicality of pioneer preachers. Bailey should have compared the AME histories with similar histories in white denominations. That comparison would have underscored better these similar patterns in both races' histories. The chapter especially fails to interrogate a longer history of physicality and masculinity in American history. Descriptions of black bodies were integral to the justifications for slavery and for European colonization of Africa. Intellect accounts for little in Bailey's analysis of the AME histories. This tip of the scale toward bodies seems to subvert many of the aims of AME literature as well as enhance an aspect of racial stereotyping. Bailey does not address these concerns. These shortcomings underscore a larger concern about the book. Its brevity hinders a full treatment of its own subject that does not do justice to the AME members. Had the book discussed more at length the historical contexts or offered a greater depth of analysis, readers would come to appreciate the complexity of the background to which AME members responded.

Readers will appreciate the book's presentation of print as both communal and communicative. Readers will especially appreciate reading this book in conjunction with Gilbert Williams's The Christian Recorder, Newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church: History of a Forum of Ideas, 1854–1902 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1996). Together, these books will give a full treatment of some of the key issues that African Americans confronted in the second half of the nineteenth century.