Lost Histories: The Good, the Bad, and the Strange in Early American Orthodoxy Paperback – May 14, 2024

I can't say that this book gave me a comprehensive understanding of how Orthodox Christianity arrived and grew in North America. However, with a collection of snapshots it gave many insights about some of the saints and a few of the sinners whose stories brought us to where we are. Some of the stories have direct bearing on questions we face today regarding language, jurisdiction and culture. Highly recommended.

Lost Histories, from orthodoxhistory.org's Matthew Namee, is new from Ancient Faith Publishing. My favorite kind of non-fiction book for my current sleep-deprived state of life, Lost Histories offers 40 short narrative-style chapters about early American Orthodoxy, so it’s very easy to take up and put down.The stories cover lives of saints, faithful, questionably faithful, and the outright heretical, from many ethnicities and jurisdictions (and pre-jurisdictions), offering both fascinating views of the stumbling attempts to introduce Orthodoxy to North America as well as snippets of stories that add flavor and remind us that historical figures do just as much good and bad as current ones. Many stories have more questions than answers, which reflects a truth even today—when stories and gossip fly around, we still don’t always know which thread is the truth.
With so many topics covered, it’s hard to pick a favorite—the different ways other denominations viewed Orthodoxy at the time? The defense of the Alaskans? The priest who defended a young woman from an murderously abusive ex? —but the story of Father Nicola Yanney and his family stood out the most to me, and made me add to my To Be Read list. The descriptions of his wife’s faith and joy at her children’s baptism, her death and Nicola’s ordination, the sacrifices he and his family made, and the deep mutual love and adoration he and his communities had for each other touched me deeply. 

I’d recommend Lost Histories to anyone who wants to feel an understanding of the individual Orthodox in North America, as opposed to a comprehensive timeline or deep dive into any one jurisdiction. Hoping for a sequel covering more of the 20th and 21st centuries!

I've followed Matthew Namee's efforts to unbury American Orthodox history for some time, and I was very excited to see he had finally written a book. This was long overdue in my opinion. But Namee didn't just create another history book to be added to the handful of others we already have on American Orthodox history, but instead offered something that is unique and uniquely him. Lost Histories is a collection of the weird and quirky from American Orthodoxy, giving almost the opposite content of a typical history book or hagiography of a Saints life, and instead giving us the strange and anecdotal, the sad and the funny, that really bring Orthodox history to life. I was glad I had read a general overview book of American Orthodoxy before this one in order to have a reference for the stories in this book, but I also found myself enjoying this book a lot more. If a typical history book is the black and white sketch of the history of American Orthodoxy, this book is the colors that make it feel alive, that makes you grasp the stories as someone who had actually experienced it. This book feels much more human than a typical history book, and I think that's particularly Orthodox to make things human, to make them incarnational.If you enjoy history and Orthodoxy, you will most certainly enjoy this book.