![]() ![]() ![]() Johnson begins by tracing changes in the Rochester economy and in local society and politics in the 1820s. ![]() It thus provides Johnson with a particularly well-defined example of economic change and evangelistic fervor. (This raises questions, but I do not object in principle.) Rochester was unusual in the rapid pace of its growth - it mushroomed from virtual emptiness in 1815 to a population of 18,000 by 1840 - and in its status as the focal point of upstate New York revivalism in 1831. Johnson uses the town of Rochester, New York, as a case study to prove his claim - not because Rochester was representative, Johnson explains, but because it was an extraordinary case. Evangelicalism, according to Johnson, was not primarily a means for the mobile economic individualist to find meaning in life it was instead a way for a dominant class of manufacturing proprietors to restore order to a community full of unpoliced and politically restive workingmen. In A Shopkeeper's Millennium, Paul Johnson argues that American revivalism in the early nineteenth century was a product of class conflict, not (as often assumed) individual social insecurity. ![]() To explain, I shall have to write at length. A fascinating, subtle, and immensely valuable study, but I have some important reservations from the author's conclusions. ![]()
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