In 1787, Jacob Norton became pastor of a somewhat moribund Congregational parish in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Like other parishes of the region in the postrevolutionary era, it lacked for new members. By 1804, Norton and his parishioners found themselves awash in revival activity that produced an abundance of new members. This essay uses Norton's situation in Weymouth during these years, as well as his reading diaries, to examine how the print revolution of the 1790s in New England related to the shift in sensibility scholars have come to call "the Second Great Awakening." I argue that the expansion of the world of print that Norton and those like him experienced had a direct impact on their willingness to see local events as part of a much larger spiritual and political movement. The wide dissemination of new types of printed materials, especially regionally published periodicals, created a shared sensibility among New England evangelicals led to the construction of a shared "social imaginary." Norton and his Weymouth parish provide a case study in the role print played in the initial reconstruction of the ideological world of the earliest cohort of Congregational evangelicals, whose efforts within a generation gave rise to the Benevolent Empire.
I begin with a foundational premise: that the basic beliefs about truth and morality that undergird a culture — any culture — are social and discursive constructions. I cannot establish this claim with absolute certainty, although I can provide the reasoning behind such an assertion. I can furnish models that show the explanatory power of such an assertion, and I can provide examples of people who use the premise to useful ends. But finally, the regime of truth I propose — one based on the belief that all truth is provisional and endemic to the culture that produces it — is one accepted on faith. In accepting it, I also accept as credible the rules of meaningmaking, the procedures, the heuristics, and the institutions through which the authority of truths are established in the culture(s) of which I consider myself a part. I can enter into dialogue with the community of those who, at least for the purposes of conversation, share these basic premises with me. With those who do not, I am at an impasse.
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