Featuring a new introduction, a compassionate look at a religious movement that shaped America “Put your hands to work and your hearts to God,” Mother Ann Lee told her spiritual children more than 200 years ago. Today, as the number of Shakers has dwindled to only a handful, the story of the Shakers has never been more important to record and understand. In this classic book featuring a brand-new introduction, Flo Morse offers a stimulating, graceful summary of Shaker beliefs and the way of life that still endures among a chosen few.
When she died in America at age forty-eight, having brought her faithful to a new land on the eve of the Revolution, she left behind a religious movement that was to have thousands of followers and become our most important and successful utopian community."--BOOK JACKET.
Canterbury Shaker Village, located in Canterbury, New Hampshire, just northeast of Concord, has seen more archeological research than any other Shaker community. David R. Starbuck has been digging there for over a quarter of a century. Beginning in 1978, Starbuck and his team mapped some 600 acres of the village, preparing sixty-one base maps, as well as dozens of drawings of foundations and mill features. Accompanying the maps were several hundred archeological site reports describing the history and present condition of every field, dump, foundation, wall, path, and orchard within the community. These documents offered the first comprehensive look at both the built and natural environment of any Shaker village. This above-ground study—with much updating—forms the second part of this volume. Through the 1980s, grant funding was available chiefly for above-ground recording and only rarely for excavating. Still, from the beginning Starbuck and his team speculated about what types of unexpected artifacts might be found if excavations were conducted in the Shaker dumps or in the nicely-manicured lawns behind the village’s communal dwellings. With the 1992 death of Sister Ethel Hudson, the community’s last surviving member, it seemed clear that Canterbury Shaker Village represented an unparalleled opportunity to use archeology as a cross-check on surviving nineteenth-century historical records and visitors’ accounts. The Canterbury Shakers constitute one of the very best test cases for historical archeology precisely because they were a society that tightly controlled their internal descriptions of themselves. Because we know what the Shakers expected of themselves, we can use excavations to determine whether they actually lived up to their own ideals. Excavations into various dumps began in 1994. In the Second Family blacksmith shop foundation, for example, Starbuck discovered thousands of pipe wasters—evidence that the Canterbury Shakers manufactured red earthenware tobacco pipes for sale to the World’s People. The Shakers’ hog house contained numerous ceramics and glass bottles; at another dump almost a hundred stoneware bottles for beer or ginger beer were unearthed along with whisky flasks, perfume bottles, and false teeth. These new artifacts contradict the popular image of the Shakers as plain, simple, and otherworldly, thereby challenging existing paradigms about the nature of Shaker society. Starbuck’s findings suggest that Shaker consumption practices were highly complex and that Shakers were perhaps more "human" than previously imagined. Neither Plain nor Simple, which brings together the original site maps with his most recent findings, will serve as the definitive archeological investigation of the Canterbury Shakers and their lifeways, and function as a model for similar archeological studies of communal societies.
"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
Featuring a new introduction, a compassionate look at a religious movement that shaped America “Put your hands to work and your hearts to God,” Mother Ann Lee told her spiritual children more than 200 years ago. Today, as the number of Shakers has dwindled to only a handful, the story of the Shakers has never been more important to record and understand. In this classic book featuring a brand-new introduction, Flo Morse offers a stimulating, graceful summary of Shaker beliefs and the way of life that still endures among a chosen few.
In the tradition of "Plain and Simple" and "The Cloister Walk", this book offers a rare, intimate account of one woman's journey into the world of the Shakers--a radical Christian sect whose belief in a Mother-Father God, equal rights for all, and direct interaction with the spirits of the dead shocked other established religious communities Print ads. NPR sponsorships .
This book takes a look at the faith, philosophy, and way of life of the country's one remaining Shaker community. Lauber explores their spiritual and daily lives by weaving together proprietary Shaker quotations, interviews, and photographs. The result is a book that pierces many misconceptions, most notably that the Shakers and their faith are dead. Lauber places the topics of faith, community, work, and worship in the context of Shaker history and contemporary developments on the American landscape.
In the half century between 1830 and 1880, the visual culture of America's oldest, largest, and most distinctive communal religious society was portrayed in scores of printed images published in the popular illustrated press. In this book, the author identifies and explicates every known engraving or lithograph that pictured the Shakers in the years of their greatest prosperity and before photography became popular in Shaker communities.
