Rising Road recounts a murder and subsequent trial that captivated the residents of Alabama during the summer of 1921. Edwin Stephenson, a Methodist minister, shot and killed Father James Coyle, an Irish immigrant who served the parish of St. Paul's Cathedral in Birmingham. Coyle had earlier married Stephenson's daughter, Ruth, to Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican Catholic, over strenuous objections by the Methodist minister and his family to Ruth's marriage and her conversion to Catholicism. Despite his confession, Stephenson was summarily acquitted after he and his lawyers (including future Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black) masterfully exploited public antagonism to Catholicism, raised questions about Gussman's ethnicity, and played up Ruth's disregard for her parents' authority.

Davies deftly contextualizes this incident within southern and US history. Drawing on deep research and compelling narrative, Davies presents Coyle's murder and Stephenson's trial as an expression of southern Protestant white men's responses, especially resistance, to changes that threatened the privileges bestowed by virtue of their gender and race. As the industrial economies of New South cities such as Birmingham exploded, their populations grew, incorporating migrants and immigrants who seemingly challenged the control exerted by southern industrialists, mainline religions, and white-supremacist political organizations. By their presence, too, such newcomers contested Americans' definitions of racial identity. The Ku Klux Klan and True America, organizations that fired up antagonism to Birmingham's Catholic residents, created a justification for Stephenson's assault on the priest and worked overtly and covertly to support his defense and generate sympathy within the jury and the broader public for the anti-Catholic movement.

Rising Road is prodigiously researched, drawing from court documents, newspaper articles, city histories, census data, and even draft registration records. Like a good courtroom drama, Rising Road is littered with details, the import of which does not become obvious until the conclusion. Mostly this detail adds context, color, and intrigue, although occasionally the detail interferes with Davies's otherwise well-paced and engaging narrative, adding asides (such as family histories and physical descriptions of minor characters) that are marginally relevant. Davies is particularly adept at summarizing and conveying the significance of voluminous courtroom testimony and legal proceedings and she effectively illuminates the extent to which antagonism to Catholics was debated in local newspapers and other publications. Her sources sometimes are disappointing, especially in revealing the motives of Ruth Stephenson and Pedro Gussman or the impact of Coyle's murder on his parish. But even these limitations make for good history, revealing, as they do, the gaps and shortcomings of public records.

In the end, Davies's account of “love, race, and religion in America” offers a vivid example of the ways that changing constructions of race intertwined with social and political conservatism in 1920s America, affecting the daily lives (and deaths) of average Americans.