As both presses and scholars are well aware, edited collections can represent both the best and the worst of the academic endeavor. Fortunately, what editors Carl Esbeck and Jonathan Den Hertog have produced in the present effort, Disestablishment and Religious Dissent, is emphatically in the first category. It offers a clear (and clearly stated) argument about the nature and process of religious disestablishment in the Revolutionary and Early Republic United States, broadly construed. Meanwhile, its separate essays offer detailed explorations of over twenty different jurisdictions. The many different perspectives taken by the individual authors (who nonetheless adhere to a consistent format) ensure that the book places disestablishment into the varied contexts that it inhabited historically. The cumulative effect of the collection is to intervene in existing scholarship in important ways without oversimplification. It ably connects the dots between the spread of legal religious freedoms, on the one hand, and the persistence of informal Protestant establishments in the nineteenth-century United States, on the other.

Much of the volume's success can be ascribed to two choices made by the editors. First, they provide an opening chapter that neatly delineates a series of findings for the shared scholarly project behind the book. Perhaps the most striking are the negative findings: neither the federal Constitution (1787) nor the First Amendment (1791) was, they argue, particularly significant for the process of disestablishment in the original colonies or in those states admitted without first being federal territory (Kentucky, Tennessee, and Maine). Similarly, they find that no state's disestablishment process was more important than any others, an assertion that has particular implications for the outsized role Virginia's history has played in standard narratives. On the contrary, the editors find, the “more closely Virginia is studied, the more it appears that the Old Dominion was in certain respects an oddity among state disestablishments” (11). Each of these claims opens space for more complexity in the way disestablishment is interpreted, and this enlargement conforms to the project's overall thrust. As the editors state: “Because establishments were complex and varied phenomena, so was the process of disestablishment. Disestablishment was a fifty-year project” (12). In the state-focused essays that follow the opening chapter, each author takes that widened time frame seriously, covering legislative actions from the earliest days of European colonization up through the 1840s and 1850s, and even beyond in some cases.

The second choice made by the editors is to order the essays chronologically, according to the “date that a given state repealed its ministerial assessment or religious tax (the state's embracing of financial voluntarism)” (17). In describing this organization, the editors note both the difficulty of providing a simple date for disestablishment in many states and also the fact that this structure puts “easy cases” first and more complex ones (notably Massachusetts, which is the last chapter) later (17). Though the editors assume that “many readers will skip around,” there is a strong case to be made for following their order and reading the book cover to cover (18). Doing so provides a rich journey through early America that starts with the cases of New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, where Americans “easily” enacted provisions “protecting the ‘right of private judgement’ in individual religious observance and practice” (10). It then swings south, tracing the difficulties of handling disestablishment in places where the Church of England had collapsed and awakening-derived denominations were gaining strength, but where (particularly in South Carolina) Anglican traditions still had considerable influence. Beginning with chapter 10, readers move west. Kentucky is followed by Tennessee, Georgia, and Ohio. Louisiana and Missouri then share a chapter. Only in the concluding third of the volume does the reader return to New England and the lagging southern state of Maryland. The result of this excursion around the United States is to connect the course of disestablishment set in motion by the American Revolution directly to the process of territorial expansion.

A significant consequence of the book's structure is to decenter the significance of the British intellectual context for understanding developments in the United States. The traditional narrative has suggested that establishments entered their death throes in the 1790s after the triumph of Lockean revolutionary ideology. While (that story posits) state support for churches lingered in the crusty post-Puritan villages of New England, the vibrant western terrain dominated by Francis Asbury's circuit riders and by the dynamic energy of events like Kentucky's Cane Ridge Revival flourished in an almost ecstatic environment of youthful freedom which begat a new and distinctive, but also post-British, religious freedom.

As is so often the case, the reality was more complicated. In Kentucky, as Keith Harper discusses in his essay, the issues of extending religious freedom and the end of slavery were explicitly intertwined. In Ohio, the terms of Congress's land sales with two separate buyers enmeshed the territory and subsequent state in the financing of Protestant churches until 1968. In Louisiana, Missouri, and Florida, the process of disestablishment unfolded as the extension of the Protestant-dominated United States into regions where the majority of the European-descended population destined quickly for U.S. citizenship was Catholic. As the reader moves through Disestablishment and Religious Dissent, these important and yet also very specific discussions of state formation in the west and south provide for a very different introduction to the discussions of New England's disestablishment process in the later chapters.

The sweep of this long narrative is, of course, balanced by its shape as a series of separate essays by individual authors. Though some are stronger than others, the writers all dutifully hit a series of important marks. They explain colonial and demographic backgrounds, they outline key pieces of legislation, and they mark connections between different states’ efforts. For this reason, the book also provides researchers with the essential nuts and bolts that can be so hard to track down and put in order. That too, is an important service. It is rare to find an edited collection that achieves what this one does, and this outcome most likely results from the collaborative work of the participants and editors over a lengthy period. Their efforts have produced a synthetic treatment that will support scholarship into the subject for years to come.