The enormous ethnic and religious complexity of rapidly growing American cities has long been a staple for social and religious historians. Often, these studies focus on major urban places such as New York City. However, Matthew Smith's carefully researched and elegantly written volume describes the impact of religious diversity and conflict in nineteenth-century Cincinnati, then and now a mid-sized regional center. In so doing, Smith makes and supports the claim that “religion in Cincinnati was more than the sum of its marketable parts. For many Cincinnatians, especially women, black people, and immigrants, it opened the door to unprecedented engagement in the public sphere” (7).

The evolution of Cincinnati's religious life cannot be understood without a knowledge of the city's changing economic and demographic circumstances. These issues are addressed in five chapters, beginning with a discussion of early Cincinnati's high aspirations and its prominent role as a launching pad for the Protestant Benevolent Empire. From there, the discussion moves to Cincinnati's growing pains as a major regional center. Boosters wanted to promote the city as the Queen of the West, but those hopes were dashed when railroads replaced the Ohio River as the primary means of western transportation and Chicago became the metropolis Cincinnatians hoped their city would become. Nevertheless, Cincinnati continued to grow, and an influx of new immigrant groups reshaped the city's culture and politics. The third chapter examines Catholic and Protestant competition as each group tried to evangelize the city and its hinterlands. The fourth chapter shows how such competition, when fueled by Protestant paranoia and large numbers of Irish and German immigrants, led to a near-victory for the anti-immigrant American party in the 1855 elections. In the last chapter, Smith shows how religious controversies spilled over into post-Civil War public education. By this time, the city was incredibly diverse as Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Unitarians, and secularists debated the role of religion in the city's education system. The end result was a Bible War that culminated with the Ohio State Supreme Court's 1872 decision to overturn the required use of the King James Bible in Cincinnati's public schools.

The primary sources for this study are rich and varied. Significant research was done in Catholic archives, and both English and German language newspapers are employed. An array of published works range from local histories, travel diaries, autobiographies and religious tracts to first-hand accounts of the Bible controversies of the 1870s.

The second chapter, “The Athens of the West,” is most evocative as it portrays the practical problems Cincinnati encountered as it became the sixth largest city in the United States by 1840. Smith analyzes an 1848 photograph to illustrate the aspirations and contradictions in Cincinnati life. At first, the image appears to present the city as a peaceful and well-ordered urban center on the Ohio River. However, closer examination reveals the city had serious drainage problems that led to disastrous consequences. There was no public sanitation system except for the swine that roamed the streets. Late every autumn, a half-million pigs arrived in the city and were prepared for delivery to other parts of the United States. The above problems contributed to cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1849. Smith portrays the city's confusion over how to deal with the epidemics, and his creative use of cemetery statistics demonstrates how the 1849 epidemic was particularly deadly for the city's Catholic and immigrant populations.

The discussion of Catholicism, both in terms of its local and international manifestations, is exceptionally strong. Although a few Catholics were present in Cincinnati's earliest days, they did not organize their first congregation until 1819. Soon massive Irish and German immigration poured into the Queen City so that Catholics had become the city's largest denomination by the 1840s. This rapid growth was managed by the skilled leadership of Bishops Edward Fenwick and John Baptist Purcell. These men had the ability to manage internal Catholic disputes regarding recreational behavior, temperance, Americanization, the King James Bible, and the use of English versus German in worship. At the same time, they presented the Church to non-Catholics as a participant in a pluralistic community rather than a threat to American Protestantism. As a result, Cincinnati Catholicism continued to be a major, but non-threatening cultural presence into the late nineteenth century.

This volume gives much attention to the Presbyterians and Congregationalists who led the Protestant Benevolent Empire. Granted, the Beechers were once the first family of American Protestantism, and, for a time, Lane Theological Seminary had considerable national influence. Without a doubt, the Evangelical United Front, with the America Home Missionary Society as its centerpiece, was a massive enterprise.

By contrast, Methodists and Baptists receive only passing attention after 1815. This is unfortunate because by 1850, the two groups comprised about half of Ohio's religious population, far more than Presbyterians and Congregationalists combined. Furthermore, Methodists and Baptists demonstrated that the Evangelical United Front was not as united as Presbyterians claimed. For instance, Sen. Richard Johnson, a devout Kentucky Baptist, was bitterly opposed to Presbyterian efforts to stop mail delivery on Sundays. Peter Cartwright, the Methodist evangelist, “scorned A.H.M.S. interlopers from ‘the eastern states where they manufacture young preachers like they do cabbages in hot houses’” (77–78). Even though the Benevolent Empire produced massive amounts of religious literature, Methodists and Baptists generally preferred to use their own denominational publishing houses. Exploring how these relations evolved and eventually dissolved would have added another dimension to an already fine work.

All told, Matthew Smith's study of nineteenth-century Cincinnati is a valuable contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century urban America and the rise of religious pluralism in the United States. By the end of Cincinnati's Bible War, most residents in the Queen City could agree that, even with their religious differences, they had a thriving community where “the spires still point to heaven.”