In 1813, Joseph Dyer, his wife Mary, and their five children joined the Shaker community in Enfield, New Hampshire. Joseph quickly adapted to the Shaker way of life, but Mary chafed under its strictures and eventually left the community two years later. When the local elders and her husband refused to release the couple’s children to Mary, she embarked on what would become a fifty-year campaign against the Shakers, beginning with the publication in 1818 of A Brief Statement of the Sufferings of Mary Dyer. The following year the Shakers countered by publishing Joseph’s A Compendious Narrative, a scathing attack on what the title page called “the character, disposition and conduct of Mary Dyer.” Reproduced here for the first time since their original publication, the Dyers’ dueling accounts of the breakup of their marriage form the core of Domestic Broils. In Mary’s telling, the deceptions of a cruel husband, backed by an unyielding Shaker hierarchy, destroyed what had once been a happy, productive family. Joseph’s narrative counters these claims by alleging that Mary abused her children, neglected her husband, and engaged in extramarital affairs. In her introduction to the volume, Elizabeth De Wolfe places the Dyers’ marital dispute in a broader historical context, drawing on their personal testimony to examine connected but conflicting views of marriage, family life, and Shakerism in the early republic. She also shows how the growing world of print facilitated the transformation of a private family quarrel into a public debate. Salacious, riveting, and immensely popular throughout New England, the Dyers’ narratives not only captured imaginations but also reflected public anxieties over rapid cultural change in antebellum America.

From the very beginning in the 1770s, singing was an important part of the worship services of the Shakers, formally known as the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. Yet until the early nineteenth century, nearly all Shaker songs were wordless—expressed in unknown tongues or as enthusiastic vocalizations. Only when Shaker missionaries moved west into Ohio and Kentucky did they begin composing hymn texts, chiefly as a means of conveying the sect's unconventional religious ideas to new converts. In 1812–13, the Shakers published their first hymnal. This venture, titled Millennial Praises, included the texts without music for one hundred and forty hymns and elucidated the radical and feminist theology of the Shakers, neatly distilled in verse. This scholarly edition of the hymnal joins the texts to original Shaker tunes for the first time. One hundred and twenty-six of the tunes preserved in the Society's manuscript hymnals have been transcribed from Shaker musical notation into modern standard notation, thus opening this important religious and folk repertoire to modern scholars. Many texts are presented with a wide range of variant tunes from Shaker communities in New England, New York, Ohio, and Kentucky. Introductory essays by volume editors Christian Goodwillie and Jane F. Crosthwaite place Millennial Praises in the context of Shaker history and offer a thorough explication of the Society's theology. They track the use of the hymnal from the point of publication up to the present day, beginning with the use of the hymns by both Shaker missionaries and anti-Shaker apostates and ending with the current use of the hymns by the last remaining Shaker family at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. The volume includes a CD of historical recordings of six Shaker songs by Brother Ricardo Belden, the last member of the Society at Hancock Shaker Village.

A member of the United Society of Believers, better known as the Shakers, Isaac Newton Youngs spent most of his life in New Lebanon, New York, home of the society's central Ministry. As both a private diarist and the official village scribe, he kept meticulous records throughout those years of both his own experience and that of the community. All told, more than four thousand pages of Brother Isaac's journals have survived, documenting the history of the Shakers during the period of their greatest success and providing a revealing view of the daily life of a rank-and-file Believer.

In this deeply researched biography, Glendyne R. Wergland draws on Youngs's writings to tell his story and to explore "the tension between desire and discipline" at the center of his life. She follows Youngs from childhood and adolescence to maturity, through years of demanding responsibility into his fatal decline. In each of these stages, he remained a talented and committed yet independent Shaker, one who chose to stay with the community but often struggled to abide by its stringent rules, including the vow of celibacy. Perhaps above all, he was a man who spent most of his waking hours working diligently at a succession of tasks, making clocks, sewing clothes, fixing roofs, writing poetry, chronicling his daily acts and thoughts.

In his journals, Brother Isaac writes at length of his efforts to control his lust as a young man, and he complains repeatedly about overwork as he grows older. He defines the rules of his community and identifies transgressors, while enciphering his critical entries (and those chronicling his own sexual desires) to avoid detection and uphold the demand for conformity. At times he admits doubt, but without ever relinquishing the belief that he is on the straight and narrow path to salvation. What emerges in the end is the complex portrait of an ordinary man striving to live up to the imperatives of his faith.

"Most writers have treated these three groups and the social ferment out of which they grew as simply an American sideshow. . . . In this book, therefore, I have attempted to go beyond the conventional focus on what these groups did; I have also sought to explain why they did what they did and how successful they were in terms of their own objectives. By trying sympathetically to understand these extraordinary experiments in social and religious revitalization, I believe it is possible to come to terms with a broader set of questions that affect all men and women during times of crisis and transition."--From the preface

Winner of the Best Book Award, Mormon History Association

Americans were enthralled by the Shakers in the years between 1925 and 1965. They bought Shaker furniture, saw Shaker worship services enacted on Broadway, sang Shaker songs, dressed in Shaker-inspired garb, collected Shaker artifacts, and restored Shaker villages. William D. Moore analyzes the activities of scholars, composers, collectors, folklorists, photographers, writers, choreographers, and museum staff who drove the national interest in this dwindling regional religious group.

This interdisciplinary study places the activities of individuals—including Doris Humphrey, Charles Sheeler, Laura Bragg, Juliana Force, and Edward Deming Andrews—within the larger cultural and historical contexts of nationalism, modernism, and cultural resource management. Taking up previously unexamined primary sources and cultural productions that include the first scholarly studies of the faith, material culture and visual arts, stage performances, and museum exhibitions, Shaker Fever compels a reconsideration of this religious group and its place within American memory. It is sure to delight enthusiasts, public historians, museum professionals, furniture collectors, and anyone interested in the dynamics of cultural appropriation and stewardship.

The Shakers are known for self-denial and austerity in everyday living and their material world, as embodied by the heavenly simplicity and purity of their chairs and blanket chests. Yet the believers also enjoyed a diversity of visual pleasures, from flowers, sunsets, rainbows, and the northern lights as seen at home to waterfalls, ocean waves, and dramatic cliffs viewed while traveling across America.

In Shaker Vision, Joseph Manca explores original texts, especially diaries and travel journals, and material culture to demonstrate that Shakers enjoyed a remarkably deep experience of the visual world. Shakers shared tastes with mainstream Americans and often employed a similar aesthetic vocabulary, but all within a belief system that made them distinct. In addition to their well-known ascetic architecture, furniture, and handicraft styles, they expressed themselves through ornate and detailed spiritual art and in vivid, visionary experiences. Based on firsthand accounts of the believers themselves, this richly illustrated volume will dramatically change how we assess the visual world of this uniquely American religious sect.

In 1788, following the death of charismatic founder Mother Ann Lee, the celibate religious group known as the Shakers set out to institutionalize equality of the sexes in their theology, government, and daily practice. In this book, Glendyne Wergland evaluates how well they succeeded in that mission by examining the experiences of women within Shaker communities over more than a century.

Drawing on an extensive archive of primary documents, Wergland discusses topics ranging from girlhood, health, and dress to why women joined the Shakers and how they were viewed by those outside their community. She analyzes the division of labor between men and women, showing that there was considerable cooperation and reciprocity in carrying out most tasks-from food production to laundering to gathering firewood-even as gendered conflicts remained.

In her conclusion, Wergland draws together all of these threads to show that Shaker communities achieved a remarkable degree of gender equality at a time when women elsewhere still suffered under the legal and social strictures of the traditional patriarchal order. In so doing, she argues, the experience of Shaker women served as a model for promoting women's rights in American political culture.