In The Kingdom of Matthias, Paul E. Johnson, and Sean Wilentz explain the difficulty in writing a micro history, While trying to resist the exaggerations and heat that accompany any weird scandal, especially one that involves sexual play, we thought we would do the same from the vantage point of a century and a half later. The trick was to try and do so without turning the protagonists into mere historical types. Johnson and Wilentz further comment on the characters in the story by stating They 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 we tried to respect their histories even as we tried to make it intelligible to our own sense of history.

Read the book, and comment critically on the following question. How do the characters in The Kingdom of Matthias reveal the conflicts and struggles of family life, social class, sexuality, and economic/political change during the Second Great Awakening?

As a think piece assignment, the paper should be clearly organized and contain a wealth of information. The use of quotations is appropriate, but use them for emphasis or reference, not as narrative, citing the author and page number in the text. The paper should be typed, double-spaced, and be five to seven pages in length. The paper will be evaluated on how well it reveals a close reading and analysis of the book, on its presentation of evidence, and on its organization and style.

-Use in text quotes quotations from the book within the paper.

-NO outside sources ONLY use the book The Kingdom of Matthias