Adam Jortner

Reading this as someone focused on religious history, it felt like a flop. So much of the content is focused on the politics and diplomacy of the time; despite the author's stated focus on a frontier "holy war," the religion and belief bits seem thrown in extra, picked out of the period documents almost as asides. For a book published by a university press, this read more like a popular history: mainly collating together and summarizing other sources rather than doing groundbreaking analysis.

Soooo much of the book was background info about the decades leading up to Tenskwatawa's movement and Tippecanoe. I was 100 pages in before I reached sustained discussion of the events and tenets of the Prophet's movement - and then most of that was contained in one all-too-brief chapter. As a book about a particular time in America's early political/diplomatic history, the frontier context leading up to the War of 1812, and William Henry Harrison, this has value for giving a lot of information in fairly accessible writing. But if your main concern is frontier religion and its relationship to indigenous ethnohistory, it's not so interesting or worthwhile a read.… (més)