Whitney Rogers Cross a mid-20th century historian, is still well known in certain American academic circles as the author of The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800 – 1850 (Cornell University Press, 1950).

Biography

Cross was born in Rochester, New York

Rochester, New York

Rochester is a city in Monroe County, New York, south of Lake Ontario in the United States. Known as The World's Image Centre, it was also once known as The Flour City, and more recently as The Flower City...

 in 1913. After completing an M.A. in History at the University of Rochester

University of Rochester

The University of Rochester is a private, nonsectarian, research university in Rochester, New York, United States. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The university has six schools and various interdisciplinary programs.The...

, he taught high school in Painted Post, New York

Painted Post, New York

Painted Post is a village in Steuben County, New York, United States. The village is in the town of Erwin, west of the city of Corning. The population was 1,842 at the 2000 census. The name comes from a painted and carved post found by explorers at the junction of three local rivers...

 from 1936 to 1939, when he left to enter a graduate program at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. Cross’s teachers at Harvard included Perry Miller

Perry Miller

Perry G. Miller was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. He was an authority on American Puritanism, and a founder of the field of American Studies. Alfred Kazin referred to him as "the master of American intellectual history"...

, widely considered to be one of the inventors of the sub-discipline now commonly referred to as intellectual history

Intellectual history

Note: this article concerns the discipline of intellectual history, and not its object, the whole span of human thought since the invention of writing. For clarifications about the latter topic, please consult the writings of the intellectual historians listed here and entries on individual...

; Frederick Merk, a social historian influenced by the “frontier hypothesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner was an American historian in the early 20th century. He is best known for his essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", whose ideas are referred to as the Frontier Thesis. He is also known for his theories of geographical sectionalism...

; and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., whose pioneering work in both social history

Social history

Social history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...

 and women’s history shaped a generation of scholars. While working on his dissertation with Schlesinger, Cross served as the first head of the Local and Regional History Collection at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. After completing his degree in 1945, he held teaching positions at Connecticut College

Connecticut College

Connecticut College is a private liberal arts college located in New London, Connecticut.The college was founded in 1911, as Connecticut College for Women, in response to Wesleyan University closing its doors to women...

 for Women, at Smith College

Smith College

Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...

, and at West Virginia University

West Virginia University

West Virginia University is a public research university in Morgantown, West Virginia, USA. Other campuses include: West Virginia University at Parkersburg in Parkersburg; West Virginia University Institute of Technology in Montgomery; Potomac State College of West Virginia University in Keyser;...

. He died in 1955.

The Burned-over District

The Burned-over District asserts that during the first half of the nineteenth century, the inhabitants of the western third of New York State

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 showed themselves to be atypically willing to give themselves over to various “isms,” including revivalism, Mormonism

Mormonism

Mormonism is the religion practiced by Mormons, and is the predominant religious tradition of the Latter Day Saint movement. This movement was founded by Joseph Smith, Jr. beginning in the 1820s as a form of Christian primitivism. During the 1830s and 1840s, Mormonism gradually distinguished itself...

, Millerism

Millerites

The Millerites were the followers of the teachings of William Miller who, in 1833, first shared publicly his belief in the coming Second Advent of Jesus Christ in roughly the year 1843.-Origins:...

, spiritualism

Spiritualism

Spiritualism is a belief system or religion, postulating the belief that spirits of the dead residing in the spirit world have both the ability and the inclination to communicate with the living...

, AntiMasonic agitation, abolitionism

Abolitionism

Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery.In western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. At the behest of Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas who was shocked at the treatment of natives in the New World, Spain enacted the first...

, feminism

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

, and experiments in communal living

Intentional community

An intentional community is a planned residential community designed to have a much higher degree of teamwork than other communities. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision and often follow an alternative lifestyle. They...

. Whether this area was in fact unusually hospitable to revivalism and social reform movements is now considered to be open to question, but this is beside the point. It was Cross’s methodology and the contours of his argument that struck his readers as innovative and worthy of imitation. Basically, Cross used materials commonly associated with local or regional history—demographic data, commercial records, and eyewitness accounts from relatively obscure individuals—to argue that the social environment constructed in this area at this time made the inhabitants more willing and more likely than most Americans of this era to pursue both their own improvement and the improvement of society as a whole. The book was reprinted in paperback as recently as 2006.

External links