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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Background Information
Abolitionism was the movement, centered in the North, that abolition of slavery even in those states that had practiced it since the founding of the country. The First Industrial Revolution introduced the use of power, from falling water and steam, as the motive force behind large-scale machinery in factories.
