Thomas S. Kidd writes his survey of colonial American history in the hope that readers “will come away with a distinct sense of how pervasive religion was in colonial America, and of the various functions that religion served in the era, functions that were variously inspiring and appalling” (xii). The volume is pitched for an interested general audience and would serve well in classrooms of upper-level undergraduates who need a well-informed overview of the colonization of what became the United States. Without neglecting the full range of forces, motives, and conflicts that contributed to colonization, Kidd strives to give religion the primacy of place that he believes it held for nearly all participants in the colonial enterprise. Religion offered not only a “path of salvation in the next life,” he argues, but also served to advance rival imperial claims and “explain the uncertain and often violent environment in which Americans found themselves between Columbus's voyages and the end of the Seven Years' War” (xii).

Kidd draws on the rich body of recent scholarship in colonial history to develop a solid, well-supported chronological narrative of colonization, cultural encounter, community formation, and political, social, and economic development throughout the period. In keeping with the perspective of much recent scholarship, he begins his story not in sixteenth-century Europe but in eleventh-century Cahokia, the great Mississippian center near present-day St. Louis. This helps shift the theater of action from Europe to America, a move aimed at framing the account in terms that include indigenous agency into the shaping of colonial history and culture. While not consistently sustained, this approach does invite readers to see colonial history as more than a process of native retreat before a relentless European occupancy.

The book touches upon nearly every aspect of colonial development in North America. It briefly surveys the conquest of Mexico and its northern borderlands and traces France's development of its arcing River Empire from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico before focusing on English colonization of the Atlantic seaboard. Kidd's scope and page limitations render his narrative somewhat episodic, centered around events that best highlight his interpretive emphasis on religion. His narrative of English colonization includes an effort to correct the common historical neglect of religion's role in the founding of Virginia and reviews the religious dimensions of initial colonization in every region. Kidd draws on recent scholarship of the Protestant Atlantic to frame the Glorious Revolution as the primary means of consolidating the English settlements into a unified colonial enterprise and the staging ground for the eighteenth-century imperial contest between Protestant England and Catholic France. Kidd punctuates the narrative of seventeenth-century development with an excellent chapter on the development of African slavery. He centers his survey of eighteenth-century growth on the Great Awakening, drawing upon by now well-known features of its emergence and spread to explore the transformation of transatlantic communication, culture, commerce, and consumption. Kidd concludes the volume by tracing the course of the Seven Years' War in America, an event he stages in two preceding chapters: one on eighteenth-century immigration and the development of settlement in the colonial backcountry and a second on the Anglo-French contest for possession of the trans-Appalachian West.

Kidd includes a helpful selection of relevant primary documents at the end of each chapter, each chosen to illustrate one or more of the chapter's major themes. Readers will encounter such gems as Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune's account of the Huron/Wendat feast of the dead, Nathaniel Bacon's appeal to divine justice and loyalty to the Crown in defense of his rebellion against corrupt Virginia oligarchs, and Phillis Wheatley's 1774 letter to Mohegan evangelist Samson Occom on the subject of slavery. The selections complement well the main themes of each chapter and provide a glimpse of the period and events in question from the perspective of contemporary participants.

Kidd's American Colonial History provides a very helpful introduction to the history of this formative period. His space constraints and organizational decisions led at times to omission and oversimplification of complex processes. The roots of Britain's eighteenth-century commercial empire, for example, lay not only in the Glorious Revolution but in the Navigation Acts and Anglo-Dutch conflict of the Restoration era. Kidd's chosen framework of “clashing cultures and faiths” also leads him to miss or neglect occasions of accommodation and cooperation. Cortez, for instance, marches into Tenochtitlan with the Spanish alone, as he has in standard middle school accounts of the conquest of Mexico for generations, without mention of the Tlaxcalan alliance that proved crucial to his success or his extensive use of allied native troops in his subsequent subjugation of the country. The Separates become the leading actors in his account of the Great Awakening, agents of religious freedom and revolution. The evangelical ecumenism that characterized much of the Awakening is less noted. These minor drawbacks aside, Kidd's American Colonial History is a well-written, critically informed account that will engage readers and teach them a great deal about religion's centrality in American colonization.