Paul William Harris is the author of Nothing but Christ: Rufus Anderson and the Ideology of Protestant Foreign Missions. For thirty-two years, he was a faculty member at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where his teaching fields included African American history and the history of religion in the U.S. He received his B.A. in American Studies and History from the State University of New York at Binghamton and his M.A. and Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan.
Deeply researched and clearly written, Harris traces the hopes for African Americans in the Methodist Episcopal Church after the Civil War (including at the time about one in five black Methodists). The author traces the story of the hopes for creating an interracial movement and eventually a reconciliation with the MEC, South, to (later) the realization that racial justice and racial reconciliation would be at odds. The story is a vital but relatively little-known one, and Harris's book should stand as the standard account. * Paul Harvey, Department of History, University of Colorado * A Long Reconstruction explicates the largely untold story of African Americans within the Methodist Episcopal Church and in doing so, pushes us to rethink what we mean by the term Black Church. Gracefully written and exhaustively researched, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in race and religion in the United. * Christopher Cameron, Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte States. *