Among the early Evangelicals began as James Gorman's PhD dissertation, completed in 2015 under the supervision of William L. Pitts at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. It ranks as one of the most important studies of Stone-Campbell history to be published during the last twenty years.

Gorman argues that the religious movement in the United States identified with Thomas Campbell and his illustrious son, Alexander, was not an American conception. Rather, the movement ‘emerged from transatlantic evangelical missions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (p. 23). Hallmarks of the broad missionary movement included an emphasis on the unity of all believers, a restoration of the simple Gospel, zealous evangelism and the millennium. Anyone familiar with the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement in nineteenth-century America will immediately recognise these themes.

The author explains that the transatlantic missionary movement was epitomised by institutions like the London Missionary Society, a flagship organisation founded in 1795, and the Evangelical Society of Ulster, which Thomas Campbell helped to establish in 1798. So, it is hardly surprising that a decade later, having immigrated to the United States, Campbell founded a similar institution, the Christian Association of Washington, Pennsylvania. Societies representing the missionary movement routinely published founding documents. True to form, in 1809 Campbell published the Declaration and address of the Christian Association of Washington. By pointing to these connections, Gorman demonstrates that the rise of the Campbell Movement in the United States owed far more to the transatlantic missionary movement than it did to the American frontier or to First Amendment freedoms in the early republic.

Gorman emphasises that his fuller account of the origins of the Campbell Movement also requires a new understanding of Alexander Campbell's religious odyssey. Traditional historiography asserts that the young, iconoclastic Campbell on display in his monthly magazine, The Christian Baptist (1823–30), was succeeded by a milder ‘second Campbell’, who presided over what he called ‘the present reformation’ in the pages of The Millennial Harbinger, which replaced the former publication in 1830. But, as Gorman shows, there was, in fact, an even-earlier Campbell who, along with his father, was deeply influenced by a movement whose central focus was mission.

By uncovering the transatlantic roots of the Campbell Movement, Gorman has identified a time in the lives of Thomas and Alexander Campbell when the restoration of New Testament Christianity was not regarded as an end. Rather, restorationism accompanied the broader goal of successful missions. In addition, the author's fuller account of the shifts in Alexander's thought and action provides a larger window on his ambivalence, which is part of what led to factionalism among his religious descendants.

An index and perhaps a few maps and illustrations would have made this book that much better. Still, Among the early Evangelicals exhibits meticulous research and advances a compelling thesis. It belongs on the bookshelf of every Stone-Campbell historian.