Why Baptist? Why in America?

Kidd, Thomas S., and Barry Hankins.  Baptists in America: A History.  Oxford, UK: Oxford UP,
         2015.  ISBN: 978-0-19-997753-6

Who are the Baptists?  Why did they migrate to America?  What role have they played in American history?  These and other questions are what Kidd and Hankins seek to answer in Baptists in America: A History.

 Kidd and Hankins open Baptists in America with the whipping of Obadiah Holmes in 1651 for the crime of being a Baptist in Puritan Massachusetts.  They proceed to describe the Baptist experience during the colonial period, the Revolutionary War period, antebellum early United States, the Civil War, the post-war period and through the twentieth century.   They discuss the periods of growth, the times of dissension, and a bit of how Baptists in all their various incarnations have played a part in American history up to recent days,

The first five chapters convey the history of Baptists during their time often with quotes from documents, speeches, and diaries of individuals.  Kidd and Hankins also does a very nice job of covering the African American Baptist experience.  They provide decent coverage of events in the Northern/American Baptist wing during the later half of the 19th Century and during the 20th Century with very few mentions of other Baptist organizations such as the General Association of Regular Baptists.  The major focus of the later chapters are on the Southern Baptists Convention and its struggles.  If the reader is looking for an complete overview of Baptist history in the United States, they will not find it here.  However Kidd and Hankins do try to set the story of Baptists in all their forms in context of the culture of the United States.