The Life of Selina Campbell: A Fellow Soldier in the Cause of Restoration

Most American historians can tell you that the founder of the 19th-century Disciples of Christ movement was Alexander Campbell, a strident primitivist who sought to restore the New Testament church. However, only a handful know that his wife, Selina Huntington Bakewell Campbell, was as ardent as Campbell himself and was a tireless religious activist in what is now West Virginia. Loretta Long's The Life of Selina Campbell: A Fellow Soldier in the Cause of Restoration reads a bit too much like a dissertation (her introduction is essentially a historiographical essay on Christian women in 19th-century America), but the topic is so unmined that this is excusable. ( May)