James Hutson is a respected authority on religion in the era of the American Revolution whose past contributions make him well qualified to author this volume in the Cambridge Essential Histories series. As a survey directed at general readers it has a number of merits. It reviews the evolution of Church-State relations in each of the colonies as opposed to focusing on a few well-known examples, and makes an effort to relate these to religious developments in England. It directs attention to those revolutionary leaders who were men of deep faith. And it offers a careful analysis of the drafting and contemporary understanding of the First Amendment to the constitution of the United States. The study is marred, however by the author's inattention to recent studies of attitudes towards religious freedom in England and the colonies by scholars such as John Coffey, Alexandra Walsham and Andrew R. Murphy, all of which have contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the subject. The survey nature of the volume leads to some oversimplifications, and readers will be frustrated by the absence of annotation, which is particularly unfortunate since there are numerous quotations from primary and secondary sources which are not identifiable.