In 2004 more than twenty scholars of religion in the Americas gathered at the University of Missouri-Columbia for a conference titled “Moving Boundaries: American Religion(s) through the Louisiana Purchase.” Richard Callahan, chief organizer of the meeting and assistant professor of religious studies at UM, edited nine of the presentations and wrote an introduction for the volume New Territories, New Perspectives, producing an impressive collection of essays on the religious dimensions of life in an enormous territory that practically doubled the size of the United States in 1803.

Like Thomas Tweed's edited volume Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Callahan's collection of essays is a reformulation of the relationship between religion and place in American history as manifested in the aftermath of a deal famously struck by Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Bonaparte. To the credit of Callahan and the rest of the contributors, New Territories, New Perspectives does not get bogged down in a nationalist narrative of the Louisiana Purchase based on the motifs of manifest destiny, the collision of empires, westward expansion, and the inevitability of Protestant advancement onto a fabled American frontier. Rather, Callahan and his cohort successfully make “the story of American ‘internal’ expansion an international story, one of religious, national, and ethnic diversity” (6). Though “only a start, a hint at some of the rich religious history of the Louisiana Purchase territory,” New Territories, New Perspectives achieves its stated goal, “to explore the unexpected—stories, practices, and issues that might not be part of a ‘traditional’ history of religion in the Midwest” (15).

Callahan frames the overall objectives of New Territories, New Perspectives in his introduction, “A Reorienting View from the Center of the Country.” Peter Williams follows with an examination of the built religious landscape of the Louisiana Purchase and finds the space to be filled with a multiplicity of architectural influences and adaptive measures. Amanda Porterfield introduces the role of sex, violence, and gender to American ideas of manifest destiny and the providentially guided incorporation of Louisiana into the early American republic. Michael Zogry attempts to fill a perceived gap in American national memory by comparing the Trail of Tears with the Lewis and Clark Expedition. And Carole Lynn Stewart's essay on Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man (1857) concentrates on the role of the Mississippi River in ideas of American destiny and the limits of liberal Protestant reforms in the Louisiana Territory.

Shifting attention to the Caribbean and Africa, Douglas Henry Daniels links the musical crossroads of Oklahoma City and Kansas City with what he sees as African religious retentions in New Orleans and West Africa. Elaine Lawless proposes an alternative origin story of pentecostalism by privileging the interracial religious gatherings of the Deep South and the movement of African and Caribbean forms of religious practice up the Mississippi River and into places like Topeka, Kansas, and Los Angeles, California. Paul Christopher Johnson insists on the integral role of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1803) and Vodou in the Louisiana Purchase, as well as the need to guard against the tendency to erase the Caribbean from narratives of American religious history. John Stewart focuses on the participation of African Creoles in Mardi Gras Indian performances in order to make broader claims for the existence of a common cultural heritage linking New Orleans with the Antilles. And Charles Long concludes the volume with a strong argument for scholars to conceive of Louisiana (and particularly New Orleans) as being as important to understanding American civil religion as are New England and Virginia.

Collectively, all of the contributors to New Territories, New Perspectives insist on a comprehensive reorientation of grand narratives about American religious history. They take issue with the way historians have conceived of the relationship between religion and nationalism in the United States, and their solution is simple enough: recenter the history of religion in America at the actual center of the continent of North America. In doing so, Callahan and the other essayists argue that there will be new and insightful avenues for exploring Caribbean, African, and Latin American connections with the continental United States. Perhaps unintentionally, however, New Territories, New Perspectives demonstrates just how little conversation there is between American religious historiography and other fields of historical inquiry that have been in the business of decentering and recentering American history for decades. It's a great big world out there—both historically and historiographically—and New Territories, New Perspectives shows how essential crossdisciplinary studies are to larger discussions about religion in North America.