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Some of us, like our executive editor Marshall Shelley, find maps a helpful entry point to the study of church history. Even better are maps accompanied by text explaining what you are seeing. A fascinating, though sometimes uneven, read in this genre is Franklin H. Littell, Historical Atlas of Christianity. For America, no one has outdone Edwin Gaustad, New Historical Atlas of Religion in America. This one shows at a glance the regional dominance of certain groups (the Baptist Deep South, the Methodist Upper South, and so forth) and the historical trends of groups—such as the radical shift from the eighteenth-century dominance of the older Established churches (Anglican, Congregational) to the rocketing nineteenth-century rise of the upstart evangelicals (Methodist, Baptist). The Penguin Atlases of ____ History (fill in the blank with Ancient, Medieval, Modern [late fifteenth century to Napoleon's fall], and Recent), though not focusing on church history, put many of its phases in context. These slim, cheap, but well-produced small-format paperbacks contain well-executed graphic maps accompanied by readable narrative text.

Church history survey texts run from the short and highly accessible, such as Timothy Paul Jones, Christian History Made Easy, designed for adult Sunday School courses, to the hefty and detailed, like Kenneth Latourette's two-volume History of Christianity (also available in a one-volume edition, both editions in paperback) and Justo Gonzalez' two-volume, but somewhat less dense and scholarly The Story of Christianity (also paperback). A slim "outline" of church history, serving as a beginner's orientation, is Justo Gonzalez, Church History: An Essential Guide, at a mere 95 paperback pages. A highly readable one-volume survey that I often recommend is Bruce Shelley, Church History in Plain Language.

If you live in North America and want to know why there's a church on every street corner—and all of them different—or what makes your church's brand of faith distinctively "American," many readable sources await you. A new series aimed at young adults provides over a dozen accessibly written, well-illustrated individual volumes organized by topic, period, and group. This is the Oxford University Press's Religion in American Life series. Jon Butler, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer's Religion in American Life contains the text of the three chronological volumes in one.

If you want to dig deeper, a number of academic classics are still readable, though more detailed and interpretive. These include Nathan Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, on the frontier period; George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, on the roots of modern American evangelicalism; Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, on that confession's history in America; Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion, on the roots of the black church in America; and Grant Wacker, Heaven Below, a fascinating, finely textured look at the beliefs and culture of early Pentecostalism. For readers belonging to each tradition covered, these books contain some true "aha" moments.

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