A quarter-century after its first publication, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 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.

Paul E. Johnson, professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a Ph.D. in 1975. He taught at Princeton University, Yale University, University of Utah, and the University of South Carolina. He is the author of A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper, and coauthor, with Sean Wilentz, of The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina, and Onancock, Virginia.
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Chris Babits is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. History at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the university's Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Fellows. His work examines the intersection of religion, psychology, gender, and sexuality in the modern United States. Chris' dissertation, "To Cure a Sinful Nation: Conversion Therapy in the United States," is an ambitious work on the nation's history of sexual orientation and gender identity therapies. You can follow him on Twitter @chris_babits.
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Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.