This is a valuable collection of essays (fourteen in total) on Halle-inspired activities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is particularly valuable in the range and detail of its contents, which capture vividly this highly complex Pietist network. Competition for influence over the evolving American religious scene accelerated the development of Halle's transatlantic network. Previously indifferent to the pastoral needs of colonial Lutherans, in the early 1740s Hallesian authorities rushed into action when the Moravian church leader and Lutheran minister Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf began to consolidate Lutherans in the Philadelphia area under his pastoral authority. Zinzendorf quickly had a challenger in Halle's own Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg. His arrival as ‘inspector of all Lutheran churches’ in Pennsylvania represented a moment of organisational traction for Halle's transatlantic network (p. 62). Mühlenberg's successful assertion of authority in Pennsylvania elevates the importance of his European backers, in particular the German court chaplain in London, Friedrich Michael Ziegenhagen. Norman J. Threinen's scrupulously researched essay on Ziegenhagen's role in the Halle network is an especially important contribution to Lutheran Pietist studies. For years Ziegenhagen functioned much like a hinge between Halle and Philadelphia and his fingerprints are all over much of early American Lutheranism, yet he typically receives little more than a dutiful, passing mention in relevant volumes. Threinen is a competent guide to researchers who will have to give more careful attention to the powerful position of Zeigenhagen's London between Germany and North America in the first half of the eighteenth century. By the 1760s, many of Halle's North American projects were becoming self-sufficient and increasingly American in their cultural and religious outlook. Mark Häberlein's essay on Lutherans in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, offers a multilayered local history of a transplanted European confessional church tradition gradually stabilising despite challenging intra-generational tensions. At the same time, as Carla Mulford explains, the leading voices of American cultural self-understanding – voices such as that of Benjamin Franklin – laboured to strengthen already firm nationalised ethnic sentiments which favoured ‘English-ness’ as the American self-understanding (pp. 150–1) in an effort to guard against ‘continental European struggles’ (p. 159). The admiring, but racially-inflected language of German industry, ingenuity and liberty seems to have been calculated to integrate a swelling population of German-speaking people into the American national identity. Adding valuable nuance to this picture, Stephen M. Nolt discusses ‘what happened among these ethnic church folk as the host culture they had just begun to understand started rapidly to change out from under them in the early nineteenth century’ (p. 259). Nolt depicts a deep cultural conflict between Anglophone evangelicals and confessional German Protestants, the former imagining America on a democratising, homogenising trajectory toward national unity; the latter nurturing ‘an American dream that promised freedom to pursue locally governed and ordered life’ (p. 271). The volume also includes essays from two accomplished historians, now sadly deceased, Donald F. Durnbaugh and Carola Wessel. By exploring aspects of print culture in the Halle network, their contributions strengthen and round out what is an impressive book.