Rebecca's Revival shows readers what an author can do on a subject with limited primary source material. Rebecca Protten is an enslaved mulatto girl born and Antigua, who is later kidnapped and taken to the island of St. Thomas. Jon Senesbach creates a narrative around Rebecca which shows the complexities of St. Thomas between the Dutch planters and the enslaved Africans and Creoles. Rebecca is used to highlight the Moravian missionaries who came and went from St. Thomas, and how their efforts largely depended upon people of colour, such as Rebecca to keep the conversion of enslaved going forward.

Rebecca becomes ordained in the Moravian way and participates in one first black congregations in the Americas. I went to a talk which was centered on religion and enslavement in the Caribbean, and one of the speakers talked about the rapid conversions of enslaved people in St. Thomas. The speaker called it the Black Acts Church (or something like that). It is shocking to hear and read, both in that talk and in this book what converts and the missionaries were willing to go through to exercise their religion. The Dutch planters were firmly against their enslaved people being educated in religion, and they barely tolerated the missionaries who kept coming to St. Thomas. Fear of another slave revolt such as the one in 1733 on St. John kept the planters very paranoid.

Due to the fragmented source material Senesbach can only guess at or suppose at some aspects of Rebecca's life, as she personally did not leave much-written material behind despite being literate. I was disappointed about the latter half of the book, not because of research or writing but because of the trajectory of Rebecca's life. She was imprisoned, one husband dies, she moves to Africa and evangelizes there (there's very little source material about her life there), she moves to Germany and another husband dies, her child dies, and she stays in Germany instead of going back to St. Thomas and dies there at an old age. I wish her life could have been happier, but most missionary narratives I've read have proved to be very contentious and dismal. Rebecca's Revival is a great microhistory that sheds light on the interconnectedness of the Atlantic world.

ps. Sensbach is my advisor in grad school and a very knowledgeable person!