| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 620 words from this article are provided below; about 484 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Glendyne R. Wergland. One Shaker Life: Isaac Newton Youngs, 1793–1865. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2006. Pp. xv, 247. Cloth $80.00, paper $24.95.
Glendyne R. Wergland's book follows a recent trend in Shaker scholarship, yet her biography of Isaac Newton Youngs contributes new information to that scholarship as well. Since the appearance of Edward Deming Andrews's The People Called Shakers: A Search for the Perfect Society (1953), several studies have provided overviews of the communal, perfectionist sect from various disciplinary perspectives. By the time Stephen J. Stein's The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (1992) appeared, scholars had begun to acknowledge that such overviews were problematic; there is not one Shaker experience. The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, as the sect formally called itself, was united by some basic beliefs and practices, such as celibacy and communal ownership of property. But the lives of believers in Watervliet, New York, just after the American Revolution and those in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, in the antebellum years were not identical. Differences in clothing, architecture, and most significantly, personalities contributed to diversity that those who study the Shakers have come to understand and appreciate. Wergland simultaneously reminds readers of one male Shaker's uniqueness as well as the potentially representative elements of Youngs's experiences among the perfectionist sect.	1
The carefully constructed and well-researched biography includes details that are placed within the context of both the community at New Lebanon, New York, in which Youngs lived for most of his seventy-two years and scholarly interpretations of life among the Shakers. As expected of an historical account, the volume proceeds in roughly chronological order, although it also consists of thematic chapters. This structure contributes to some redundancies and overlap, as events and sources sometimes appear in more than one chapter. The positive perspective, of course, is that the repetition clarifies the points Wergland wishes to make, and the book's clarity is among its numerous strengths.	2
For those readers familiar with the sect and the scholarship, Wergland insightfully challenges and extends prior arguments about such popular topics as labor, lust, and aging. For example, prior attention to labor has appeared in feminist analyses that have focused on female leadership initiated by founder "Mother" Ann Lee, the power gained by female Shakers free from childbearing, and the Shakers' maintenance of traditional female roles such as food preparation and needlework. Here Wergland foregrounds the expressive and repressive aspects of a male's numerous laboring roles, beginning with his apprenticeship at tailoring, through his oversight of apprentices in the tailoring trade. This analysis compares the Shaker experiences to those in "the world," in a period predating child labor laws and extended education for most American youths. Discussing Youngs's love of clockmaking, Wergland provides a full-blown picture of one artisan and engineer, extending Jerry V. Grant's and Douglas R. Allen's Shaker Furniture Makers (1989), which distinguishes the craftsmanship of specific Shakers—who were not supposed to assert their individualism or their egos through design and artistry.	3
The richness of Wergland's analysis emerges not only from the breadth of her research in American history and psychology but also from the depth of her immersion in Shaker documents and other material artifacts. The clocks that Youngs created as well as the voluminous pages of documents he left behind contribute to the account. Chief among the texts are the official public record of the church family at New Lebanon and Youngs's personal diary, in which he sometimes inscribed encoded passages. Easily decoded yet unlike others he clearly deleted, these reveal his differences with the church leadership and disappointment with his own imperfections.	. . .

There are about 484 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.