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A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 | 
 enlarge | Author: Paul E. Johnson
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 22604
Media: Paperback
Pages: 240
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 0809016354
Dewey Decimal Number: 973
EAN: 9780809016358
ASIN: 0809016354
Publication Date: June 21, 2004
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Condition: Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
Highly readable social history. August 19, 1999
Glenn M. Harden (Jarabacoa, Dominican Republic)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
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.
 Excellent study of "The Burnt-Over District" of upstate NY. February 21, 2000
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
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.
Revivals, Charismatic Actors of the Second Great Awakening. July 16, 1998
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
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.
Great Book June 21, 2000
Derek N. Lyall (Virginia)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
For those who want to discover how the Second Great Awakening affected the town of Rochester, New York, then this book is for you. You can tell the amount of hardwork that Johnson put into this book by the sheer amount of information that is contained within.
 An interesting though not quite convincing account October 25, 1999
john maass (johnmolly@aol.com) (Clemmons, NC)
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
Though Johnson does his homework in bringing Rochester and revivals to life, the book is too short. Nowhere do we get background on the Great Awakening; the role of women is glossed over hurriedly; and incredibly Johnson leaves out as an explantion for the interest in revivals one of the most basic assumptions: spirituality!
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