Ebook: The crisis of the standing order: clerical intellectuals and cultural authority in Massachusetts, 1780-1833

A study of the clash of cultural elites in the early American republic. Historian Peter Field focuses on the issues of power, prestige, and self-interest that fueled the struggle between the Boston Brahmins and their orthodox rivals, the Congregational Standing Order--and laid the groundwork for New England's remarkable literary flowering in the19th century.