Building on Ray Billington's seminal work, The Protestant crusade, 1800–1860 (Chicago 1938, rev. 1952, 1964), Steven Green focuses on the later nineteenth century with setup of the American contexts of earlier debates on the Bible in public schools. In these debates, Roman Catholics objected to the use of ‘sectarian’ (i.e. Protestant) Bibles and Bible-reading practices in common schools, while Protestant groups took issue with breakaway Catholic schools receiving tax dollars with which to teach ‘sectarian’ (i.e. Catholic and allegedly anti-democratic) religious beliefs to America's future voters. I approached the book most keenly interested in the ‘Bible’ and ‘school’ aspects of the title but found that the American constitution receives the most thorough discussion. I was also expecting from reading the subtitle and introduction that throughout the book there would be sustained connections to present-day American religion, education and politics, but I did not find this to be the case either. Green's argument is that, seen together, the events and court cases relating to the school question in the nineteenth century (especially the proposed Blaine Amendment of 1875) were the first time that America came close to having a national discussion about a constitutional principle, the separation of Church and State. Green successfully shows that American Protestants (to say nothing of their European counterparts) were divided into many factions themselves. While anti-Catholic rhetoric certainly was prominent, he points out, there were also considerations of religious equality at play, toward Jews if not Mormons, along with notions of the state's duty to promote democracy and good citizenship through education but not to interfere with an individual's or family's rights of religious freedom. Green's sources on the Bible in American public schools, ranging from court documents to newspaper articles of the times, are impressively extensive and highly useful. Many of these I was excited to encounter for the first time and will definitely be following up myself, including a sermon from 1870 preached at the Congregational Church in my own town of Middlebury, Vermont (quoted from on p. 119 and cited at p. 273 n. 69). Adding both a comprehensive bibliography at the end of the book and a more thoroughly prepared index would have made the book more user-friendly in guiding scholars and students to these rare sources and forgotten stories that Green has brought to our attention. After reading thirty pages of endnotes, I was disappointed not to find mention of a single past or recent book on the history of the English Bible, in many of which the King James Bible and its rival versions in America have been a particular focus. The Reformation received but one mention: ‘The anti-Catholic impulse of the mid-nineteenth century was not new but built on a 200-year-old legacy of interdenominational antipathy (much longer if one includes the 400-year European conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism).’ I strongly disagree with his statement later on the same page: ‘Aversion to the Roman Church and the Catholic religion was so pervasive in early America that it was unremarkable’ (p. 73). Some engagement with the legacy of Reformation and Counter-Reformation debates over the translation and interpretation of the Bible was certainly warranted. There could also have been discussion of controversial Bible Society activities in America and in conjunction with Protestant missions worldwide. In Green's own area of expertise, however, the book does make an important contribution to our understanding of a nuanced and longstanding American debate, with insightful interpretations of standard and rare sources alike.