Bounds of Their Habitation

Starred review from November 28, 2016
Harvey, professor and chair of the department of history at the University of Colorado, follows up his 2016 Christianity and Race in the American South: A History with an excellent second survey of race and American Christianity. He expands the focus, taking in not only relations between African-Americans and Christianity, but also the Hispanic and Native American experiences; it would have been nice to see Harvey spend more time elaborating on his Mexican-American and Native American sources. He takes a broad chronological view, opening with a consideration of the relations between 18th-century Christian churches, both Protestant and Catholic, and slave, Mexican, and tribal populations, and moving along quite rapidly to an examination of late 20th-century liberation theology, with a brief mention of the Black Lives Matter movement. He also offers an essay-style “Note on Sources,” dividing his bibliographic survey by chapter for ease of reference. This book will be comfortably accessible to the general reader but should interest the scholar as well. Throughout this informative history, Harvey displays excellent handling of his sources and is at ease with the more theoretical aspects of his topic.

November 15, 2016
Harvey's contribution to the American Ways series is a compact overview of his scholarly specialty, race and religion in America, from the English colonial period to the present. The operating assumption is that race and religion are categories invented in the modern world and used to shape social hierarchies, cultural expressions, and political power. They were earliest applied to deal with the Native Americans of New England and Virginia and, soon after, the black Africans forcibly impressed into slavery and, in time, other non-white and non-northern-European migrants, including Chinese and Japanese, South Asians, and Latinos. Among the products of this application were Christian apologies for slavery; Jim Crow; the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; legalized segregation; Know-Nothingism; the Ku Klux Klan and its anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic spawn; and denial of First Amendment protection to Native American religion. The reactions included slave uprisings, the NAACP and minority-rights advocacy, the 1950s and '60s civil rights movement, liberation theologies, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and Black Lives Matter. A magisterial precis.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)