Stephanie Stidham Rogers analyzes thirty-five American Protestant Holy Land narratives to show how American Protestants’ understandings of the Holy Land were transformed between the Civil War and World War II. She argues that American Protestants worked to make the land more familiar by rendering it more “biblical” (12), a multi-pronged process that entailed shunning Eastern Orthodox and Catholic shrines and fashioning new ones at sites they found more natural and original; turning local Arabs into biblical figures; and, especially by the early twentieth century, coming up with schemes to relocate Jews there.

As an example of the first point, Protestants disgusted by the rituals and decor at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre approvingly turned their attention to the Garden Tomb, an ancient tomb that British explorer/archaeologists suggested fit the biblical description of the one Joseph of Arimathea provided for Jesus’ burial. The British planted a beautiful garden there, and to this day many Protestants seek it out as an alternative to the Holy Sepulchre. As for the second point, in their belief that the East had long been static, Protestants turned local Arabs into biblical figures. Almost everything about the Arabs appeared to them to illustrate long-ago biblical customs, especially the details of their clothing, farming, and animal husbandry. Protestants had Arabs pose for photographs and then identified them as biblical figures, such as “Rachel watering the camels” or “Ruth and Boas” (71).

The final point, about visions of Jewish resettlement, is a contribution Rogers makes by virtue of the time period she has chosen. Many scholarly works on Protestant Holy Land narratives deal almost entirely with the nineteenth century and therefore do not extend to the millennialist Jewish resettlement plans that Rogers details here by early Christian Zionists like William Blackstone and Arno Gaebelein. I would like to see more analysis of the potential contradiction between point 2, biblicizing Arabs, and point 3, biblicizing the land by populating it with Jews. I suspect there was a shift from the former to the latter over the period discussed here that could be more clearly delineated and thus deepen our understanding of the development of Christian Zionism. If so, that would echo the trend discovered by Shlomo Sand among Jewish historians writing throughout the same period (The Invention of the Jewish People [London: Verso, 2009]). In the nineteenth century, Sand shows, many of them saw the local Arab population as descendants of biblical peoples, and thus understood them to be blood relation to the Jews who were moving to Palestine. Over time, Jewish historians shifted to arguing that most Arabs had moved into the area as late as the nineteenth century. Sand attributes the shift to the worsening political situation between Jews and Arabs.

While Americans were indeed frequent travelers to the Holy Land in the age of steamship travel, they were not the only ones. Presumably a similar book could be written about the way, for example, Russians, British, Germans, or French invented a Holy Land to suit their particular needs. Thus, the title could use some nuance, perhaps as Inventing the American Protestant Holy Land. Even so, we would not want to take the idea of “inventing” too far. Rogers concludes that this “was the epoch when the broader Protestant public began to form opinions about Palestine where they previously had none” (146). I find it unlikely that they had no preconceptions about Palestine. Brian Yothers, for instance, draws our attention to the way authors spent time engaging with, and disagreeing with, the works they had previously read (The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876 [Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007]). The writers Rogers discusses also had access to Holy Land narratives that were earlier than their own, and this brings up the question of what impact those earlier writings had on them.

As one example, Rogers notes the disappointment that pervades these texts, particularly about the pre-existing non-Protestant churches that Protestants found so offensive. Thinking about intertextuality suggests that the disappointment travelers felt at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre might have been a reaction they had learned they should have from reading previous books. I would argue that this is what is going on in The Innocents Abroad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), where Mark Twain's first reaction to the church is almost ritualistic (if funnier than most). What has been overlooked is that, apparently, Twain ended up appreciating the church. A few chapters later, he remarks that his tour group is “surfeited with sights. Nothing has any fascination for us now but the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We have been there every day and have not grown tired of it, but we are weary of everything else” (582). Similarly, William Cowper Prime (whose narrative is distinguished from almost all other American ones by his refusal to mock or sneer at non-Protestant Christians) wrote that he was prepared from having read Edward Robinson's books to feel disgust at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and so was surprised when he felt awe (Tent Life in the Holy Land [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1857]). Another example where intertextuality may play a role is in Protestants’ descriptions of the land. Rogers writes both that they perceived the land as cursed and that they were shocked by its condition as an “Ottoman backwater” (13). It could be that they were having their perception of a cursed land confirmed by what they saw rather than having it confounded. Thus, it could be that the “dirty, poor Ottoman backwater” (144) that Rogers refers to several times was itself a matter of Protestant perception rather than a reality.

Rogers's selection of texts is particularly to be commended. She chose thirty-five narratives out of more than five hundred in order to represent a range of Protestant denominations. She includes several women's writings and the narrative of one African American minister, Charles Walker. Thus, some of the most well-trod-over narratives, like Twain's, are counterbalanced by reference to sources, such as Frances Willard's recently transcribed journals, that will come to the attention of a broader audience through this book.