This is a richly documented study of Anglican and Methodist Christianities in New York City during the early republic and antebellum periods. The book fits in one sense within the venerable genre of institutional church history. Bulthuis follows the life of four well-known, still-active congregations: Trinity Episcopal Church, John Street Methodist Chapel, Mother Zion African Methodist Church and St Philip's (African) Episcopal Church. Yet if his approach is in important ways conspicuously traditional, it is none the less deeply informed by the social and cultural turns. While Bulthuis attends to the many ways in which the clergy shaped congregational life in early nineteenth-century New York City, he also offers illuminating analyses of class, gender and race. He draws on a vast range of congregational and municipal records to trace the shifting occupational profiles of the four congregations, and moreover finds compelling new evidence for the now well-established fact that American women have long comprised a majority of the people in the pews: indeed, Bulthuis's digging reveals that while women comprised only 10 per cent of pew renters at Trinity Episcopal, they represented fully 64 per cent of communicants (p. 78). Many readers will doubtless find his extended treatment of African American church life especially rewarding. His intimate familiarity with both black religious worlds and the wider contexts in which they were situated yields, among other things, a convincing explanation of why it was St Philip's – and not the more racially progressive Mother Zion – that bore the brunt of white rage during the anti-abolition riots of 1834. One plot line that runs through the book pertains to how each of the four churches, having once aspired to a vision of ‘organic unity’, made their peace with the growing segmentation of the industrialising city. Bulthuis writes that, by the cusp of the Civil War, ‘none had within their congregations the class and racial breadth of the colonial-era churches. Each congregation represented a slice of the city, not the full sweep of the city streets’ (p. 200). This represents one of the more ambitious and satisfying story arcs in a book that does, at points, lose the proverbial forest for the trees. If, as a result, it fails to hold the attention of some generalists, it will nevertheless be of great help to those interested in how churches and cities grew up alongside one another in the early republic.