As a volume of essays written by former students of Donald G. Mathews, a distinguished historian of religion in the South, Varieties of Southern Religious History, offers rich insight into the social and cultural history of the United States. The fifteen essays, edited by Regina D. Hampton and Monte Harrell Hampton, offer fresh and insightful interpretations in the fields of United States religious history, women’s history, and African American history from the colonial period to the twentieth century. Up-and-coming scholars as well as established authors examine a range of topics on the cultural and social history of the South and the religious history of the United States.

Essays that present new scholarship include a consideration of Kentucky Presbyterians and their reaction to the rising pluralism of the early nineteenth century. Gerald Wilson offers an analysis of anti-Catholic bias in North Carolina during the twentieth century, and Mary Frederickson examines the rhetoric of death in contemporary correspondence. There are also essays that reinterpret previously examined subjects such as late eighteenth-century Ohio Valley missionaries Lorenzo and Peggy Dow, a re-contextualization of Millerism, and new scholarship on the appeal of Spiritualism in the South.

Each historian of U.S. women examines how an individual struggled with gender conventions in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Robert Martin and Cheryl Junk, touching on how women struggled with the gender convictions, discuss Anne Wittenmyer and Frances Bumpass, respectively, demonstrating how religious ideology both provided space for these women to move into new roles yet limited their activities to specific realms. Emily Bingham offers a study of how Henrietta Bingham challenged gender roles in the early twentieth century.

Historians of African American history offer provocative revisions of key topics. Larry Tise explores the complex religious, social, and political issues faced by late-eighteenth century slaveholding Quakers. Monte Hampton uses the transition of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, from a biracial congregation to an all-black church by 1835.Wayne Durrill and Thomas Mainwaring present reinterpretations of well-studied subjects: the Nat Turner rebellion and the Underground Railroad.