Don Wildman

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It is the 1700s in Manchester, England, a northern city whose population has doubled, then doubled again in little more than a century, transforming from modest market town into the beating heart of the British industrial world.

Here, within the red brick walls of a textile mill, the senses are overwhelmed.

The mechanized motion of power looms, carding engines, spinning frames, all fills the air, clattering, whirring.

Fibers are drawn, twisted to thread, and thread becomes cloth, all to the steady percussions of wood and iron and stone.

Thumping, spinning, thumping, spinning.

an ocean away in the woods of Niskayuna, New York, the rhythm continues.

But here it is the thumping of feet on wooden floors.

The spinning is bodies turning, worshippers circling, all caught up in an ecstatic dance of devotion.

To trace these rhythms and movements from factory floor to forest clearing, from England to America, is to follow the extraordinary rise of the shaker movement.

Hello all, welcome to this episode of American History Hit.

I'm Don Wildman, glad you're listening.

In the early life of the American Republic, as the new nation crossed from the 18th into the 19th century, an extraordinary wave of spiritual searching swept the land.

It would later be called the Second Great Awakening and echoed the first one in the previous century.

Out of this fervor emerged new sects, expanding Protestant denominations, and a remarkable array of reform movements and utopian experiments, many of them first taking root in the colony then state of New York.

Among them was one community whose influence proved unusually powerful and sustained.

They were known as the Shakers.

On this episode today, we trace their origins, their astonishing rise, and their long, quiet fading from American life.

And we'll do this with historian Doug Winiarski, professor of religious studies and American studies at the University of Richmond, the Tenacious Spiders.

His research explores the extraordinary religious ferment of early America, having authored the award-winning Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, experiencing religious awakenings in 18th century New England, which won the Bancroft Prize.