The crisis of the standing order
Subtitle: clerical intellectuals and cultural authority in Massachusetts, 1780-1833
By: Peter S. Field.
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Amherst
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
Subjects: Elite (Social sciences) -- Massachusetts -- History -- 18th century.; Elite (Social sciences) -- Massachusetts -- History -- 19th century.; Congregational churches -- Massachusetts -- Clergy -- History -- 18th century.; Congregational churches -- Massachusetts -- Clergy -- History -- 19th century.; Social conflict -- Massachusetts -- History -- 18th century.; Social conflict -- Massachusetts -- History -- 19th century.; Massachusetts -- Intellectual life -- 18th century.; Massachusetts -- Intellectual life -- 19th century.
Description: This book examines the demise of one Massachusetts intellectual elite, the Congregational Standing Order, and the rise of another, the Boston Brahmins, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Peter S. Field traces this division within the culturally dominant class to the emergence of a new group of wealthy urban merchants, who funded Brahmin efforts to create America's first secular high culture.

With the founding of the Monthly Anthology, the establishment of the exclusive Boston Athenaeum, and the takeover of Harvard College, the merchant-backed Brahmins constructed a competing locus of cultural authority against the claims of the orthodox ministry.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-259) and index.