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I believe that Paul Johnson’s decision to use Rochester, New York as his focus case study was an excellent decision for many reasons. First, as Dr. Shrout mentioned in class, it is illogical and inconvenient to do a detailed and lengthy study like this with multiple communities. The records that Johnson uses are specific to the locality, and therefore he would have had to travel often to do a study with multiple communities. I like that Johnson admits that Rochester may not be the most representative community for the subject of the great awakening. Rochester is not the typical revival story, but it is such an extraordinary one that we can learn so much from studying it.
Another reason Rochester is a smart place to study is because Charles Finney spent so much time there. The Second Great Awakening took place all over the United States, but what I remember about the revivals from high school history textbooks is the burned-over region in New York and Charles Finney. Using a place that Finney preached at for so long makes sense to me because I view him as the most famous and accomplished Second Great Awakening minister.
Rochester was also a blend of so much of the rest of the country. It was the first major inland city. Yet, the canal kept it connected to the powerful cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and even London. At the same time it was connected with the country side. There was also a large amount of diversity in wealth and professions. You had the wealthy land owning farmers who gave Rochester its name and beginnings and there was the growing intercity community that consisted of master workers and shopkeepers along with a fluid and ever-changing group of journeyman craftsmen. Johnson gives us insight into all the different types of people living in Rochester so that we are able to see the diversity and how each class of people made their religious decisions.
Paul Johnson also did a good job balancing specifics with generalizations. He gives individual stories of families that began the city (like Colonel Rochester’s family) and of poor, orphaned men who became the extremely wealthy in Rochester (like Thomas Kempshall and Abelard Reynolds). He balanced this with good statistics and charts that allowed him to make broader generalizations. On the religious side, he gave specific examples of converts with charts of profession and percent change (of church membership). This allowed him to make inferences about why groups of merchants, master shoemakers, doctors, or lawyers did or did not convert with Finney. I found that most of the inferences that he made, I bought. For example, Johnson wrote about the reasons that so many master workmen converted, yet these reasons did not explain why lawyers also had a high conversion rate. Johnson explained this high conversion rate with details about Finney’s past as a lawyer and how most lawyers were politicians that could not resist the church. Overall, I thought that Johnson did a good job using specific details from his research in Rochester to make generalizations and explain some of the reasons for the huge revival in the city.
Price makes several great comments in his blog this week. The only part I disagree with is his criticism of Johnson’s generalizations and simplifications. While I do agree that some of Johnson’s statements may have oversimplified things, I think that it is alright to do that in a historical paper. It is impossible to study every single person in the town. Johnson studied a few specific people and statistics, and then this allowed him to make broader generalizations. The nature of historical studies will not account for every example. Price argues that Johnson didn’t take into account all of the nuances of the town. I see his point, but I believe that the nature of this topic and history itself doesn’t allow for Johnson to view all the nuances.