The Crisis of the Standing Order · Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780-1833

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.