While religious diversity is often considered a relatively recent phenomenon in America, the Cape Fear region of North Carolina has been a diverse community since the area was first settled. The Cape Fear River and the port city of Wilmington were more urban than the rest of the state; thus the region provided people with opportunities seldom found in other parts of North Carolina. These opportunities drew residents from many ethnic backgrounds, and the residents brought their religious traditions with them.

In A Coat of Many Colors, Walter H. Conser Jr. explores how religious and racial diversity in the Cape Fear region have functioned as a microcosm for the South and examines the ways in which religion can affect such diverse aspects of life as architecture and race relations.

Walter H. Conser Jr., professor of religious studies and history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is the author of several books, including God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America.

Reviews:

"Conser does a superb job with the broad strokes, and how they represent developments in American religious history. The book's breadth of coverage makes its own significant contribution. Conser's methodology, in fact, provides an excellent model for other historians who seek to tell the story of American religion in regional locations. --Mark G. Toulouse, Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth, American Historical Review

"A Coat of Many Colors is a sweeping survey of religious life in southeastern North Carolina from pre-European contact to the recent past. Richly detailed and deeply researched, Conser - a professor of religious studies and history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington -- demonstrably writes with an intimate awareness of the region he describes. To be sure, A Coat of Many Colors is now the authoritative work on religion in southeastern North Caolina, but this volume is not simply a narrow provincial study."--Luke E. Harlow, Rice University, Journal of Southern Religion

"Walter H. Conser Jr. provides a thorough survey of religion in the Cape Fear region, the southeastern quadrant of North Carolina... [which] is a microcosm of the larger history of religion in America. Along the way, we learn about local people, institutions, and churches, with a degree of detail and specificity that could only have come from a historian who is also a local resident."--Journal of American History

"Conser bolsters his book's chronological sweep by steadying it upon a sturdy and eclectic evidentiary foundation... Deeply researched subregional studies like this one will provide scholars with the tools they need to take up Conser's call to create a new map of America's changing religious terrain."--North Carolina Historical Review

"Represents regional institutional history at its best. . . . Conser's work deserves attention from all who are interested in southern history, American religion, and sociocultural studies. Highly recommended."--Choice

"Uses sermon texts, congressional records, newspaper accounts, and family memoirs to explore the evolution of religious life in the South from Native American traditions to the arrival of mosques and Buddhist temples."--Wilmington Star-News

"A wonderful book, broadly conceived, deeply researched, beautifully written, and carefully documented. It exemplifies that aphorism about how much can be learned by asking 'big' questions about little places."--John B. Boles, William P. Hobby Professor of History, Rice University

"The variety and sweep of the narrative take the reader's breath away."--Robert Calhoon, University of North Carolina at Greensboro