A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 [Paperback]

Paul E. Johnson (Author, Preface)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 21, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0809016354 | ISBN-13: 978-0809016358 | Edition: First Edition, 25th Anniversary Edition

A quarter-century after its first publication, A Shopkeeper's Millennium remains a landmark work--brilliant both as a new interpretation of the intimate connections among politics, economy, and religion during the Second Great Awakening, and as a surprising portrait of a rapidly growing frontier city. The religious revival that transformed America in the 1820s, making it the most militantly Protestant nation on earth and spawning reform movements dedicated to temperance and to the abolition of slavery, had an especially powerful effect in Rochester, New York. Paul E. Johnson explores the reasons for the revival's spectacular success there, suggesting important links between its moral accounting and the city's new industrial world. In a new preface, he reassesses his evidence and his conclusions in this major work.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is far more than a study of local history, and more even than a provocative interpretation of the social sources of religious revivalism. It is a brilliant pioneering assault upon the most important unaddressed problem in American historiography--how our society and very personalities were transformed by the rapid advance of the capitalist market in the earlier nineteenth century." --Charles Sellers, University of California, Berkeley

"Johnson's book is indispensable for any understanding of the evangelical revival and related reform movements in New York's 'burned-over' district. No less important, Professor Johnson has brilliantly fused the quantitative methods of the 'new social history' with a sparkling style and an imaginative reconstruction of social reality. Both in substantive conclusions and as a model for future regional studies, A Shopkeeper's Millennium is one of the freshest and most exciting books I have read in the past few years." --David Brion Davis, Yale University

About the Author

Paul E. Johnson, professor of history at the University of South Carolina, is co-author, with Sean Wilentz, of The Kingdom of Matthias. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina, and Onancock, Virginia.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang; First Edition, 25th Anniversary Edition edition (June 21, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809016354
• ISBN-13: 978-0809016358
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #95,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent study of "The Burnt-Over District" of upstate NY. February 20, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

New York State's construction of the Erie Canal transformed the tiny frontier town of Rochester into young America's first inland boom town, with an economy based on milling local grain and transporting the flour east to feed the older coastal cities. In this role, it became the prototype for all the thousands of commercial towns and cities that sprang up along railroads across the Midwest during the nineteenth century, as well as the crucible in which the Midwest's particular brand of evangelical protestant piety was first worked out. 'A Shopkeeper's Millenium' is by far the best examination of this important piece of American history I have found anywhere, and I recommend it highly.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Highly readable social history. August 19, 1999

By Glenn M. Harden

Format:Paperback

Paul Johnson's highly readable case study of Finney-inspired revivals in Rochester argues that these revivals were a response to the breakdown of social relationships involving work. His research finds that the revivals converted the relatively stable entrepreneurial class of Rochester who had recently abandoned former traditional employer-employee relationships where the employee boarded within the home of the employer. The revival legitimized this abandonment (and the resulting free labor system) by emphasizing the individual's moral freedom. Furthermore, the revival united the entrepreneurial class behind a mission-oriented Protestantism that enabled them to assert economic pressure, and a measure of social control, over the working class. While clearly sympathetic to the working class perspective, Johnson does not create a Protestant hegemonic conspiracy where none existed. Although one may dissent from his fundamental assumptions and approach, Johnson's argument is quite effective within the framework he has set for himself. I recommend this work to students of religion and society and antebellum reform.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Revivals, Charismatic Actors of the Second Great Awakening. July 15, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Through patient research (six years in the making) and profound interpretation Paul E. Johnson has composed a small, but masterful, account of how the rising bourgeois class of Rochester, New York shaped its budding culture around religious action within the tsunami of pre-industrialism that was flooding American mill and manufacturing towns during the early nineteenth century. Taking Rochester as a representative microcosm of the new capitalist paradigm that was sweeping the new nation, A Shopkeeper's Millennium dissects the roots, causes, changes, and outcomes that occurred during 1815 to 1837 that paved the way to a new dominant culture where old paternalistic norms for social control gave in to devout religious internalization. Johnson's thesis centers around the climatic role that the Rochester religious revival of 1831 played in converting not only individuals first, but in the aftermath, Rochesterian society as a whole. The Rochester revival of 1831 played a! ! vital role in the Second Great Awakening. Rochester was the pivotal point in Charles Gradison Finney's rise to fame. As Peter Worsley in his book, The Trumpet Shall Sound, discovered that "charisma provides `more than an abstract ideological rationale...It is a legitimation grounded in a relationship of loyalty and identification in which the leader is followed simply because he embodies values in which the followers have an interest.'" Through Finney's charisma, converted Rochesterians; many being the master workmen or manufacturers; took the proverbial "bull by the horns" and ran with their new found paradigm--a paradigm that justified, through religious conversion, the acts that one social class should dominate another for economic gain. Prior to the 1831 revival, social construction in Rochester was quite different.