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Paul E. Johnson is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina

Werken van Paul E. Johnson

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Geboortedatum
1942
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male

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In Sam Patch, The Famous Jumper, Paul E. Johnson traces the life and career of Sam Patch as insight into the culture of Jacksonian America. Discussing Patch’s two most famous jumps at Niagara and Genesee Falls, Johnson argues, “These two waterfalls… were places at which (and about which) the more comfortable and enterprising Americans invented, acted out, and publicized lessons about material progress and spiritual uplift that they would carry through the century” (pgs. xi-xii).

Johnson links Sam’s first publicized jump at Passaic Falls with the changing forces of industrialization and shifting class consciousness. He writes that Patch’s jump was “a grand and eccentric gesture thrown into contemporary conversations about nature and economic development, class and masculinity, and the proper uses of waterfalls” (p. 43). Johnson continues, “When Sam Patch said that leaping waterfalls was an art, he tied his jumps to familiar notions of Anglo-American manhood. In Patch’s world a man’s art was his identity-defining skill” (pg. 53). Turning to Niagara Falls, Johnson discusses how the upper classes used visits to the falls to circumscribe ways of appreciating aesthetic beauty, particularly natural wonders (pg. 80). Patch added greater showmanship, incorporating clothing and symbols that reflected his tradesman background. Johnson concludes of his Niagara leap, “The immense power and the old vertical horrors of Niagara provided the backdrop. The skill, daredevil courage, and plucky nonchalance (with its touch of the morose and suicidal) of Sam Patch provided the action” (pg. 123).

The Genesee Falls at Rochester further dramatized the clash between natural wonder and industrializing development in the Jacksonian Republic. Despite the grand designs of the wealthy, a thriving working class established communities on both sides of the river. Johnson writes of Patch’s time in the Flour City, “Insofar as Sam Patch had a sponsor in Rochester, it was the town’s sporting crowd. More particularly, it was the loose fraternity of men who drank alcohol” (pg. 134). He continues, “A walk through Rochester was a play of story and memory that constituted another city – a city that had become a battleground between the respectables and the people who befriended Sam Patch” (pg. 142). The very place of Sam’s leap dramatized this clash. Johnson writes, “From where Sam’s audience stood, with Frankfort and Dublin at their backs, with the cracked limestone shelves on which the city stood clearly visible, and with the giddy disorder of the chasm at their feet, it was the landscape of progress that seemed somehow thoughtless and dangerously out of place” (pg. 153).

Following Sam Patch’s death, he transformed into a celebrity and figure out of folklore onto whom various writers projected their ideas of the American spirit. Johnson concludes, “Sam Patch won a new kind of fame. He was born into obscurity, and he did nothing that classicists considered worthy of renown. Yet he wanted to be famous and he succeeded: he made a name that everyone knew, deeds that everyone had heard of, virtues and peculiarities that were the stuff of boyhood fantasies and barroom jokes” (pg. 164). Johnson’s account of Patch’s life provides unique insight into the Jacksonian period, while his larger conclusions about class, gender, and celebrity speak to the nature of American mass culture in the twenty-first century, helping to shed light on its early origins in a readable and authoritative volume that describes events modern readers would recognize from their own diet of popular culture.
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½
 
Gemarkeerd
DarthDeverell | 2 andere besprekingen | Jan 15, 2023 |
In The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America, Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz argue, “The Matthias cult spoke with strange eloquence to the social and emotional upheavals in which they lived their own lives – particularly their struggles to redefine what it meant to be a woman or a man in the new world of the nineteenth century” (pg. 11). Johnson and Wilentz work within the milieu of the Return to Narrative and Microhistory, telling a riveting narrative based on primary research that exposes the religious conflicts arising out of the Second Great Awakening, the market revolution, the beginnings of Jacksonian Democracy, and new sexual mores.

Discussing Matthias’ religious though, Johnson and Wilentz write, “He had thought long and hard since his first prophecy failed, poring over scripture, reflecting on everything that had happened since his childhood, mixing class resentment with a new-found hatred of preachy Christian women” (pg. 82). Of the Burned-Over District, they write, “Rochester was roaring with the conversions of hundreds of women and their businessmen husbands. It was the Finneyites’ grandest triumph thus far, the greatest revival of religion the nation had ever seen, in one of America’s fastest growing cities. The Prophet Matthias was sure that he could capture the revival for himself and rout the phony Christians” (pg. 84). Alas, a quarrel with his brother – who had famously painted both the Publick Universal Friend and Red Jacket – resulted in Matthias failing in his Rochester mission and returning to New York City.

Much of the story of Matthias played out in, and spread through, the popular press of the time. Johnson and Wilentz write, “The Matthias story hit the police blotter just as a new genre of daily newspapers, the so-called penny press, was making its debut, and these papers would cover the story relentlessly… The Matthias story, with its themes of religious delusion, sexual depravity, and (in time) alleged murder, was perfect fare for the penny press editors” (pg. 146). Later authors, like Poe, Melville, and Whitman, would find inspiration in these accounts. According to Johnson and Wilentz, “By investing the crime stories with literary depth, these authors established their connections to the popular commercial culture of the day” (pg. 171). Meanwhile, “Democrats, Whigs, and radical workingmen; deists, Finneyites, and high-church conservatives; all picked over the available evidence about Matthias and his cult during the winter and spring [of 1834-1835], looking for clues to some grander meaning, hoping to support their conflicting views respecting humankind, God, and the United States of America” (pg. 150).

Johnson and Wilentz conclude, “For all their seeming eccentricity, these extremist prophets have a long and remarkably continuous history in the United States; they speak not to some quirk of the moment or some disguised criminal intention, but to persistent American hurts and rages wrapped in longings for a supposedly bygone holy patriarchy” (pg. 173). As a caution to other historians seeking to narrativize the past, Johnson and Wilentz point out that historical figures “suffered, raged, swooned, and betrayed without knowing anything about a ‘market revolution’ or a Second Great Awakening, concepts that historians only imposed much later. They lived in their own histories, not ours, and [Johnson and Wilentz] tried to respect their histories even as [they] tried to make it intelligible to our own sense of history” (pg. 186).
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Gemarkeerd
DarthDeverell | 3 andere besprekingen | Feb 1, 2019 |
This is the story of a small cult whose rise and fall is most interesting—even the authors agree—as a window into the great controversies about religion and gender unsettling the country at the end of the 19th century. “Matthias” actually tried to get welcomed by Joseph Smith & crew at the end of his active life, but he was too controversial for them (!), owing to the widely reported scandal about whether he or one of his followers had killed his benefactor (whose wife he had also taken as his own, which was really the scandal that sold the papers). The authors present Matthias as part of a larger evangelical, patriarchal backlash against new varieties of religious life that were largely led by women, or at least in which women could claim equal moral authority in instructing children in religion and making claims about godliness.… (meer)
½
 
Gemarkeerd
rivkat | 3 andere besprekingen | Nov 28, 2017 |
The Second Great Awakening, religion, economy, politics, it's all here.
 
Gemarkeerd
BooksForDinner | 4 andere besprekingen | Feb 1, 2016 |

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Werken
5
Leden
949
Populariteit
#27,107
Waardering
½ 3.7
Besprekingen
12
ISBNs
30

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