Books like The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840

Jack Larkin does a wonderful job examining early American daily life, with an emphasis on the changes that occurred from 1790 to 1840. While it might be more obvious for some in our day to point to the changes in the last century, there was a sizable shift in culture as America came into the Victorian era. As Larkin points out, not everyone experienced these changes equally, yet in time they would reshape just about everything. These changes were not uniformly good or bad. To generalize, the older culture was virtually a unique American version of historic Western culture, not all that far removed from medieval Europe at times. It was largely communal, familial, agrarian, crude, and violent. The newer culture was increasingly restrained, refined, private, industrial, comfortable, and sentimental. To understand where we got today, we must learn how we got here, and broad generalizations and simplifications don't really give us all we need. I think this book contributes much towards our understanding of how these complex changes came about. It seems to me, and the author points to this several times, that the revivals (i.e. the Second Great Awakening) had much to do with these changes, whether they were for better or worse. The benefits of these evangelical movements are perhaps more obvious (e.g. increase in church attendance, decrease in drunkenness), but what I perceive to be the detrimental effects that followed them include their tendency to individualism, a narrow perspective of the Christian life, and a view of decency and morality that was often divorced from God's law and the Old Testament.In short, I enjoyed the book, and it gave me a better idea of early American life. This was especially helpful for me because I work at a historical site that focuses on the period covered in this book. This book is really close to getting five stars.