A Shopkeeper’s Millenium

Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837

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.